about our new hometown

We returned from our first visit to Zombodze, the town we’ll call home after training is completed, and we really like it.

We stayed there for 4 days and nights, meeting community members and exploring the area and living in our new home on the Nsibandze homestead. We already have an office at the umpakhasti—which is the Chief’s homestead and which acts as a kind of community center or hub—and we have a great local counterpart named Senzo Nzibandze, a talented young man who’s spent the last few years working hard on community development projects in his hometown. Senzo set up all the introductions for us—school headmasters, nurses and care providers, headmen and community elders, etc—and he spent each day showing us around and introducing us to projects that we might want to get involved in. potential projects include:

water supply and garden development

support for OVCs (orphans and vulnerable children) via the Neighborhood Care Points (NCPs) and their Junior Gardeners program

assisting the health clinic and home-care providers

working in the primary school (they’re trying to get a library) and the high school with student clubs, teacher support and extracurricular activity development

and more. there will be plenty for us to do. In all, I counted about 13 different potential community projects in various stages of development.

All of this is great news for us. As Peace Corps Volunteers, the biggest fear is that you’ll be put in a place where there’s nothing to do, where boredom (and then despair) sets in. To find so many opportunities in Zombodze, as well as a motivated and skillful local counterpart, is what every Peace Corps Volunteer hopes for.

Some highlights of our visit… meeting the chief was cool. It’s a formal affair and somewhat nerve-racking, but things went well. We met our new Swazi family, which is a very large extended family full of children, cousins, aunts, mothers, brothers and sisters. The homestead is very big, with dozens of homes and structures stretched across a hillside. Senzo is both our counterpart and our brother, and he lives just 5 meters from us on the homestead. He took us for a great hike up to a nearby mountaintop—Jamie and I will be going up there a lot. It’s beautiful, and the roundtrip walk from home is maybe 8 kilometers through fields and forests.

Zombodze has two little grocery stores, a carpenter’s workshop, an electronics repairman, a gas station (during plowing when the tractors need fuel), a seamstress, a veggie market, a community garden and a garden run by OVCs, a Neighborhood Care Point (which helps to feed OVCs), a primary school, a high school and a vocational training center. From nearly any hillside in Zombodze, one can see South Africa, marked by the distant cars and trucks traveling along its paved highway. All the roads here are dirt, but they’re in good shape (with some bad spots during heavy rains), and it’s mostly level terrain. There are good jogging routes all over the place, combining trails with dirt roads, and Jamie has already found a few favorite loops. This is a safe, close-knit community, and everyone waves and smiles as we pass by their fences.

Jamie is already famous in Zombodze for her jogging habit. Every other person we met said to her, “oh ya—I saw you running this morning.” I cannot overstate how rare it is in Zombodze for any white people to be visiting—to say nothing of living there—so seeing Jamie run past the fence at 6 in the morning can be a memorable way for these farmers to begin their day. Needless to say, we’re sort of a spectacle in Zombodze, and it’ll take a while for our novelty to wear off. People yell and wave to get our attention, and many are stunned when we answer in their native tongue. Surprised laughter is the most common response, followed by a flood of questions. Even with all the initial stares and attention, I still felt an underlying sense of comfort. Zombodze will make a great home for us.