Nothing happens when you expect it to here.
Swaziland has, among many other fascinating and colorful cultural traditions, a very different concept of time. A very forgiving concept of time. This was actually a training point for us during our first three months – Swazis, generally speaking, do not do punctuality. A meeting at 10 am could be at 10, or 11, or 2 pm. The kombi driver that said he was leaving “manje” could indeed mean he is leaving now, or he could mean three hours from “manje.” You could be left with 50 swarming girls because the teacher forgot to tell you she wouldn’t be able to make it that day. And yet, for all its frustrations, this is my excuse for not posting a blog sooner – Swazi time.
Swazi time, lack of internet, and days that are simultaneously full and empty. Swaziland is a world away from any home I’ve known so far—my first few months were spent without electricity, cooking by candlelight on a gas stove, and going to bed by 7 if I’d forgotten to charge my computer out of sheer boredom. Our bus to and from our training village in the mountains, where we lived with host Swazi families, bounced on unpaved roads and frequently had to avoid the cows that are ubiquitous here and apparently have little sense of self-preservation when it comes to moving vehicles. If we wanted to treat ourselves during lunch while at our training university, we went down the street for chicken dust—roasted chicken served out of an old shipping container with two leaves of spinach and a hunk of pap (a bland staple food made of maize; think day-old grits without butter or salt). I discovered which foods can and cannot survive unrefrigerated; however, my hut was basically a refrigerator at night, so my findings may be skewed.
It’s now been three months and some change since we blearily arrived at the Jo’burg airport, where our bags were miraculously unstolen, and the inbetween has been both a whirlwind and a drag. We spent our first few months in what the US government calls “Pre-Service Training” and what anyone who’s gone through it calls “Peace Corps Jail.” This was six days a week of training sessions, which included two hours of language, culture classes, safety & security information, and, occasionally, visits from current Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs, we adore acronyms here) to impart some of their tested knowledge. September 3rd we celebrated our Swearing In – our metamorphosis from trainees into Volunteers, a distinction that involved mostly a bank account – and I was voted to give the speech, during which only a few people fell asleep. Our move-in day, the day after our celebration, was hallmarked by lots of aspirin and even more rain. And since then, we’ve been spread across the country, trying our very best to Integrate with a capital I.
Integration is a tricky thing. To do anything official in the community, you have to be formally introduced to the chief, to the Bucopho (literally “brain”), and to the whole community – until then, you are a officially a stranger. We aren’t technically allowed to begin any projects until the end of Integration, though that didn’t stop one of my counterparts from leaving me alone to teach fifty girls about self-esteem one very hot Friday morning. Our job is simply to meet people, which we try to do through homestead surveys, through making a community map, and—in my case—from sitting in the sun eating emafati with the makes (mothers) and complaining about how hot it is. Or I smile helplessly through a conversation I do not understand on the bus on the way to Manzini. Or I wade my way through a mass of small people who all of them, all of them, want to touch my hair. It’s tough, in part because there’s so little to actually get done, but also because these first months set the foundation for the rest of our service—a lot of pressure when my best sentence to date is “Ngiyakhuluma kancane siSwati,” directly translating to “I only speak a little siSwati.”
But it hasn’t all been work and no play. Due in small part to my batted eyelashes, and in large part due to the fact that our culture coordinator wanted to go anyway, we were able to go to the inaugural King’s Cup, a soccer tournament between two of the big South African teams (the Orlando Pirates and the Kaizer Chiefs) and two Swazi teams (the Swallows and the Royal Leopards), which was a day that started with a mob to get in a stadium smaller than my high school’s track, and ended drinking ciders out of Swazi car trunks as we watched the sun set. At the beginning of September we went to Umhlanga, the Reed Dance, a traditional Swazi event that involved thousands of girls from all over the Kingdom who come to cut reeds and present them, with song and dance, to the Queen Mother to repair the windbreak on her house. And in the inbetween, we made the most of our time together. The Community Health village of Nkamanzi dominated the Youth Development village of Sihhoweni in a game of soccer to which the entire community showed up; we went to a Swazi wedding where we watched traditional dancing during the day and then danced ourselves under the stars to a DJ in the evening; my language group and I got together on Sundays to avoid four hour church services and cooked breakfast and watched movies. The porch of my hut opened up onto the valley, and I used to sit with my gogo –grandmother in siSwati—and watch the fog hang over the trees as I ate incwanwa (sour porridge) and the dog named Bopsi sat underneath my skirt and waited for me to be careless. We played with kids and hiked three hours up cursed waterfalls to the very top of the sacred mountains where we found perplexed Swazis asking us why we didn’t just use the road. We ate a lot of Swazi food we intentionally didn’t request translations for.
To be honest, I watch a lot of Seinfeld. I sleep a lot. And there are some days when I haven’t left the hut, or even my bed, in large part because the enormity of this undertaking seems a little unmanageable. I’ll watch 30 Rock or Midnight in Paris or House of Cards and I will be filled with longing for the places that I know, the places that I love and are familiar to me and in which I have a home. But the good days outweigh the bad ones; the possibilities of what could be done here outweigh the echoes of things I could have been doing instead; and at the end of the day, I’m doing what I’ve dreamed of doing since I was five years old.
Every day now around 5, my host brother comes out with a soccer ball, and we play one-touch. Both of us are equally bad, and the ball more frequently goes into the cornfield than it does to the person we were aiming for, but we laugh a lot. The sun crayons itself streakily down through the mountain peaks. The dog ignores us. The air smells like woodsmoke, you can hear the sounds of the valley going home around us, and as much as I miss my family and my friends and my smoky dive bars the world over, this life of endless rice and girls singing and the chance to leave some sort of imprint of my brief passing – this is all right too.
Emily Wolfteich 