The first day of school was always one of my favorite days of the year. New backpacks filled with new clean notebooks, six pencils ready to go, schedule in hand, and it was another year for new friendships, new books, new everything.
The first days of school in Swaziland have looked nothing like my autumnal beginnings. These first days are marred by tears and by locked gates, and, today, by a strike by teachers for higher pay. School fees are a strong center of concern in Swaziland; in families that can stretch to twelve children a pop, paying not only for books and pencils but for uniforms and for tuition can often be too difficult for parents whose resources are already stretched thin. This is becoming particularly obvious now, as Swaziland continues to get sucked dry by this pernicious drought. (Oh, wait, nevermind – the King declared that the drought was magically over.) Particularly in the southern lowveld, dead cows have become an eerie sight on the sides of roads – and cows, in general, represent the bulk of a family’s wealth, at E3000 apiece. And for those kids whose parents can’t pay, they are banned from the schools, and in some cases, physically locked out. We shall see what the harvest brings, but with the expected rise of food prices, and the already exorbitant price to have water delivered to communities, we expect the rate of children in school to drop dramatically next year.
Yet still, even with the extremely dismaying sights of mothers begging for leniency to send their children to school, the new school year brings fresh starts. The communities tend to stagnate during the holidays, with students either visiting relatives or working at home, or hiding in bushes to scare their friendly Peace Corps volunteer while she’s carrying groceries up a hill. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, not here anyway. The mountains provide endless spots for hide and seek; giant boulders become mountains to conquer; when the world is sad and lonely, playing with kids will always make it better. And despite my latency on this blog, I too have been keeping busy!
In December, we helped run the second camp for Boys Reaching Out – an organization of clubs around Swaziland that focuses on male identity and self-esteem, as well as several sessions on leadership, on relationships, and on drugs and alcohol. As an avowed and very loud feminist, the first few days were a little tough (I’m not even going to go into some of the opinions about hitting women or men who change diapers). But, in the end, BRO camp is the most rewarding thing I have done so far. The visible change in attitudes and perceptions, the amount of introspection and creative thinking, and the unbelievably good flashmob, not to mention the boys themselves, convinced me that the Peace Corps, for all its flaws and drawbacks, does do great things, things that will outlast us and hopefully shape future generations. And what a joy and honor to share in those changes.
Now that school has begun again, so too will our GLOW and BRO clubs. At the moment, we have a GLOW club at our primary school and BRO at the high school; this year we will try to introduce GLOW at the high school and BRO at the primary. I’m particularly excited for introducing high school girls to GLOW – in my eyes, they are the most in need of a space of their own, where they can speak freely and ask questions, and learn, and teach. I’m in (slow, slow) discussions with our HIV counselors at the clinic in order to support and grow their HIV support group for kids, called Super Buddies; mostly I sit in their waiting room and cheerfully use my ten words of siSwati over and over again. I will start writing the GLOW grant for next year soon; we recently had our GLOW training of counselors and club leaders; we’re laying the groundwork to establish a group that advocates and trains community members on behalf of the deaf population in Swaziland. I am unsuccessfully trying to introduce my host brother to Pilates; so far he is unreceptive. Attrition shall conquer all. Except the earwigs.
Over New Year’s we went to Durban, South Africa, and I embarrassingly shed a tear as we crested a hill and I saw my first skyscraper in six months. I also cried over the nachos. And the ocean. And the wifi. All in all, an emotional few days, but days in which I immediately felt back home – I was made for cities, really. It was very tough to return; and in the wake of our return, two of our volunteers terminated their service early to return home. It made me question my service. Am I doing something useful here, something that couldn’t be done by a Swazi? Or am I just taking up space? Could I be doing something even more useful at home in DC, or my other home, in France? How much of this is naiveté and how much is truly useful? Why was I previously not more grateful for washing machines?
But here I am and here I will remain, drinking bitter black tea on my porch and watching the maize blow against the background of the mountains, making faces at the chickens, listening to my old but good music and making plans. In a few weeks will be our wine-and-cheese themed Galentine’s day, where I get to be cheerfully snobby and everyone else will cheerfully ignore me. A few weeks after that is the Ultra Cape Town music festival, where I get to dance for 48 hours straight with two of my main chicks. And in the meantime are sunny, gorgeous days like today, where my walk to the store was a chainlink of kids wanting to talk to me, of girls like Sandile who earnestly tell me that education is the most important thing in her life, of tiny triplets who offer me a fruit that I’ve never seen before but can’t stop eating, of a free ride from the khumbi driver who only calls me Red. When I first arrived, the last volunteer’s shadow was still heavy on the community, and I reacted by hiding from it. But now, I walk down the dirt road and still can’t believe that I’m living out the dreams of my childhood, that I’m living on my own in Africa, that I have the opportunity here to make at least a few lives better. We work hard, we play hard, we dream big and sometimes we fail miserably. And every day I remind myself of the beauty in the world, and of our mandate – as the privileged, as the idealistic, as people – to create as much of that beauty as we can ourselves.
Emily Wolfteich 