Sept. 21- jamie-girl, here...
Life here is Zombodze has undergone a few changes this past week. The last school term of the year started on Monday. Groups of maroon-uniformed boys and girls are walking to class every morning while I am out jogging. The term began a week later than planned due to recent celebrations on September 6th marking Swaziland and the King’s 40th birthdays. As a result of the school children’s return to class, the bo-make market near school has increased their supply of chips, emaswidi (candies), and frozen juice, i.e. colored sugar water, sort of like a snow cone, which they sell in sandwich bags. The children bite a small hole in the corner of the bag to carefully suck the liquid on their lunch break or their long walk home. Children frequently ask Tim and I to give them “emaswidi”—even adults boldly make the request. I suppress the urge to say, “I can’t give you emaswidi, but I can give you information about HIV/AIDS, support groups, and where to get tested. All you are asking of me is for candy-- really? I haven’t done a very good job explaining to you why I am here. Please, ask me for more.” Zombodze has a history of outsiders coming into their community, and recently, much of that relationship has been centered on food handouts and other foreign aid reliefs as drought and poverty have hit Swaziland. So, the concept of us facilitating community driven improvements and building their capacity is something we will need to explain as we continue to interact with community members.
Elections, which take place on a 5-year cycle, were also held this past week across Swaziland. It has been exciting to be here during this time. Swazis are increasingly vocal about their struggle with unemployment, rising food prices, and growing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs). They are definitely demanding the government’s attention. People lined up for at least 200 meters to vote in Zombodze on Friday. Police officers were present to monitor peaceful protesters, but otherwise the day was without incident in our community. From our standpoint, the completion of elections provides us with the person we will be partnering with as we propose community development projects during our service.
Zombodze elected the first disabled representative in the country’s history. He is a T12 paraplegic who was injured about 20 years ago in a mining accident in South Africa. He recovered for a year in Pretoria before returning to Swaziland. He has devoted his life to advocating for the marginalized disabled population of Swaziland and actively partnered with many organizations to secure equipment and wheelchairs for the disabled. He has formed a group of nearly 300 people with disabilities. Incredibly, I am the first physical therapist he has ever met in Swaziland. I’m planning to make myself available to his group when they meet to help in any way I can. It’s amazing to me that of all the places in the world, Peace Corps sent us to Swaziland, and of all the sites in Swaziland, we were assigned to a community in which a community leader has an organized group of people with disabilities that I am in a position to help. I have to believe that is not just coincidence. I wasn’t anticipating doing much work directly related to physical therapy, but now that the opportunity has presented itself, I am wishing I had brought more materials!
Also this past week, we finished planting our second garden with the bo-make and joined the struggle to water our seeds. We have trenches of cabbage, onion, carrot, beet and tomato, as well as individual holes with green peppers. Tim and I are withholding our enthusiasm at this point until we actually see sprouts of green poke up from the soil. We don’t have much confidence in our gardening capabilities. We have faithfully done what we were instructed to do by knowledgeable Swazis: form trenches, sprinkle manure and fertilizer in them along with the seeds, cover the seeds with long bunches of dried grass to retain the scarce moisture we are providing them, and water everyday. It sounds relatively simple, but we remain doubtful. Providing water everyday has been our challenge. We are learning that the trench system that supplies water to our two gardens is not regulated between the OVC and bo-make groups. There appears to be no schedule to allow either reservoir to adequately fill up, leaving lots of water stranded in the trench and wasting the valuable, scarce resource of water that each of them is depending upon. We are hoping that our involvement in both places will help us to be viewed as neutral as we work toward a solution to allocate the water effectively.
Finally, the weather has also been unpredictable and changing. I guess Spring usually is. The sky fluctuates from hot and sunny to cloudy and rainy in a matter of hours. The wind is our one constant, but even it is erratic, blowing from various directions each time we venture outside. Truth be told, we’ve been experiencing more dreary days with thunderstorms or drizzle than anything else the past few weeks. It is more pacific northwest than the pacific northwest, if that is possible (On this point, my husband respectfully disagrees. I am not qualified to make such a statement). The difference being that the muddy ground is mixed with animal waste and the temperature outside is the same as indoors. I’ve been drinking more hot drinks than I probably should and we crawl into bed early to take advantage of our blankets. On the up side, watering the garden has been easier.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
things that creep and crawl
Oct06- The other day we were moving brush and making some temporary repairs to a fence around one of the gardens, and Jamie-girl spotted a rain spider crawling along one of the gum tree branches. From leg-tip to leg-tip, this thing was around 8-10cm long, and the only spiders I’ve ever seen bigger were the tarantulas in Arizona. The good news is, it didn’t bite Jamie-girl. The somewhat bad news is, we’ll likely see these things quite often. Our little plant/animal guide to Swaziland says they’re common, widespread, and have “mild venom.” The word “mild” there is really overshadowed by that other word, you know? So I guess from now on we’ll exercise “mild caution” when handling brush.
Coincidentally, I had just been thumbing through the spider section of that book the night before seeing the rain spider (which is the only reason I could identify it), and its description caught my eye not because of the “mild venom” comment but because of two other words: “enter houses.” That’s the last thing I wanted to read; if something’s gonna be big and creepy and venomous, let it stay outdoors-- the last thing I want it to do is “enter houses.” And reading through the rest of the book’s section on local invertebrates further convinced me to step up my efforts (which had already begun) to seal up any little holes and cracks in the walls. We found some ants on the floor a few days back and that launched an effort to find and block their thoroughfares. While doing this I happened upon a modest-sized black spider in the corner behind our food shelving, and as it managed to elude the little wad of toilet paper which I so bravely wielded, it occurred to me (for the thousandth time now) that I’m in Africa—which meant that this was some kind of African spider I was pitting myself against, and perhaps I was outmatched.
It seems to me, if you want to make scarier an animal already kind of scary to begin with, add the locative description of “African” to its name. Example: bees can be kind of dangerous, I guess, but what about Africanized bees? Downright frightening. Or scorpions—they already carry a fair amount of dread with their name, but consider to us North Americans how much more dreadful an African scorpion sounds. Which would you rather face on a dark night with nothing but a flashlight and a flip-flop: a North American scorpion or an African scorpion? Before you answer (and saying “neither” doesn’t count), consider the following description of the (African) buthid scorpion, excerpted from my guidebook: “runs fast with tail straight out, stings readily.” And yes, they too are “widespread.” Or consider the very next entry on my book’s page, the (African) liochelid , a “medium-sized” scorpion whose length—this must be a typo, please let this be a typo—ranges from “9 to 10 cm”. That’s like 3-4 inches, my fellow (metrically-challenged) Americans, And yes, of course it’s widespread—they’re all widespread.
I won’t even get into details on the snake section of our book, other than to say that it lists no less than 19 snakes common to our specific region/climate (so-called “montane grasslands”), 5 of which have a red skull-and-crossbones symbol next to its picture.
So anyway, back in the kitchen… the sudden awareness that I was dealing with an African spider got me thinking that perhaps it could be a more formidable foe than the North American varieties (of which, to be sure, there are downright nasty ones—black widows, brown recluse, Charlotte…). So I did what any sensible young (African) warrior would do: I got myself a bigger wad of toilet paper. And after I killed it I cracked open our Swaziland plants/animals guidebook to see if it was pictured. It wasn’t. But that rain spider was, and so was the sun spider (“medium-sized hairy spider-like creature [huh?] with enormous jaws but lacking venom”}, the banded-legged golden orb spider (“widespread, large spider…mild venom”), the golden-brown baboon spider (“widespread, large robust hairy spider… venom not dangerous to man”) and a few other excellent eight-legged reasons to seal up those cracks and always carry the flashlight to the outhouse after dark.
If you’ve read this far, you probably need a palette-cleansing image to counteract all the unnerving, creepy, itch-inducing descriptions to which I just subjected you. So here’s one, sticking with the African-as-descriptor animal theme: the striking African monarch butterfly, of which our book describes as “widespread, large-winged and brightly colored… flies all year.” They look just like the monarchs back home, except bigger. Picturing it? Feel better now? But wait— here’s my favorite detail about those pretty butterflies: “distasteful to birds because of poisonous chemicals stored in its body.” How cool is that? So, note to self: enjoy looking at the African Monarchs, but try to resist the temptation to pop them in my mouth.
The spiders, on the other hand, are apparently quite edible, and taste like (what else?) chicken.
Coincidentally, I had just been thumbing through the spider section of that book the night before seeing the rain spider (which is the only reason I could identify it), and its description caught my eye not because of the “mild venom” comment but because of two other words: “enter houses.” That’s the last thing I wanted to read; if something’s gonna be big and creepy and venomous, let it stay outdoors-- the last thing I want it to do is “enter houses.” And reading through the rest of the book’s section on local invertebrates further convinced me to step up my efforts (which had already begun) to seal up any little holes and cracks in the walls. We found some ants on the floor a few days back and that launched an effort to find and block their thoroughfares. While doing this I happened upon a modest-sized black spider in the corner behind our food shelving, and as it managed to elude the little wad of toilet paper which I so bravely wielded, it occurred to me (for the thousandth time now) that I’m in Africa—which meant that this was some kind of African spider I was pitting myself against, and perhaps I was outmatched.
It seems to me, if you want to make scarier an animal already kind of scary to begin with, add the locative description of “African” to its name. Example: bees can be kind of dangerous, I guess, but what about Africanized bees? Downright frightening. Or scorpions—they already carry a fair amount of dread with their name, but consider to us North Americans how much more dreadful an African scorpion sounds. Which would you rather face on a dark night with nothing but a flashlight and a flip-flop: a North American scorpion or an African scorpion? Before you answer (and saying “neither” doesn’t count), consider the following description of the (African) buthid scorpion, excerpted from my guidebook: “runs fast with tail straight out, stings readily.” And yes, they too are “widespread.” Or consider the very next entry on my book’s page, the (African) liochelid , a “medium-sized” scorpion whose length—this must be a typo, please let this be a typo—ranges from “9 to 10 cm”. That’s like 3-4 inches, my fellow (metrically-challenged) Americans, And yes, of course it’s widespread—they’re all widespread.
I won’t even get into details on the snake section of our book, other than to say that it lists no less than 19 snakes common to our specific region/climate (so-called “montane grasslands”), 5 of which have a red skull-and-crossbones symbol next to its picture.
So anyway, back in the kitchen… the sudden awareness that I was dealing with an African spider got me thinking that perhaps it could be a more formidable foe than the North American varieties (of which, to be sure, there are downright nasty ones—black widows, brown recluse, Charlotte…). So I did what any sensible young (African) warrior would do: I got myself a bigger wad of toilet paper. And after I killed it I cracked open our Swaziland plants/animals guidebook to see if it was pictured. It wasn’t. But that rain spider was, and so was the sun spider (“medium-sized hairy spider-like creature [huh?] with enormous jaws but lacking venom”}, the banded-legged golden orb spider (“widespread, large spider…mild venom”), the golden-brown baboon spider (“widespread, large robust hairy spider… venom not dangerous to man”) and a few other excellent eight-legged reasons to seal up those cracks and always carry the flashlight to the outhouse after dark.
If you’ve read this far, you probably need a palette-cleansing image to counteract all the unnerving, creepy, itch-inducing descriptions to which I just subjected you. So here’s one, sticking with the African-as-descriptor animal theme: the striking African monarch butterfly, of which our book describes as “widespread, large-winged and brightly colored… flies all year.” They look just like the monarchs back home, except bigger. Picturing it? Feel better now? But wait— here’s my favorite detail about those pretty butterflies: “distasteful to birds because of poisonous chemicals stored in its body.” How cool is that? So, note to self: enjoy looking at the African Monarchs, but try to resist the temptation to pop them in my mouth.
The spiders, on the other hand, are apparently quite edible, and taste like (what else?) chicken.
Past and Present in Zombodze
We aren’t the first Peace Corps Volunteers to live here in Zombodze. The last one was here for about a year back in 2005(ish). But about 25 years ago a young PCV named Dan Webber was placed here, and his influence and projects remain an important part of this community—and an important part of our own PCV experience thus far. What follows is a pretty cool story, folks, and it continues to unfold.
The first time we visited Zombodze we walked into the carpentry workshop and met the carpenters, a young man and an older man. When the older man learned that we were PCVs, he pulled down a framed black-and-white photo from the wall above his workbench and handed it to me. I saw in the photo two men shaking hands in front of a van with the words “Sebenta PC Training” written on its side. One of the men was a Swazi, dressed in traditional Swazi clothes, and the other was a young westerner with a big beard and an even bigger smile. The carpenter told us that the picture was taken back around 1982, and that the westerner in it was Dan Webber, a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d lived and worked here in Zombodze—and whose projects included constructing the very building in which we stood. In fact, all the buildings in that complex of workshops and stores are the result of Dan’s outstanding partnership work with the community.
As I held that picture and listened to our friend translate the carpenter’s account of how much Dan did for him and the community, I felt myself apart of something larger, and I knew, standing there, that I was right where I wanted to be. And though I’d already been in training in Swaziland for a few months, I think that might have been the moment my personal Peace Corps experience began: The gray-bearded carpenter (Mkhulu Twala is his name) returned the picture to its place on his wall, told us he was happy we’d arrived, and invited us to come visit him any time. We have.
It gets better. I told this story to a fellow PCV a week or so later, and she told me that in fact Dan Weber was on Facebook and had contacted some Swaziland PCVs regarding his old community of Zombodze. Later she gave us his email (thanks, S.), and since then we’ve been in direct contact with Dan (I think he even reads this blog—hi Dan!). He’s passed us some photos and an account of his time here back in the day (1981-83), including pics of Mkhulu Twala and other people in the community that he’d befriended and worked with. His experience in Zombodze was incredible—Dan built his own home here and he could speak fluent siSwati upon leaving, and the results of his community development work endure.
So we’ve been able to share those photos Dan sent us with Twala the carpenter as well as others who knew Dan, and we gave them updates about him. And it’s been an amazing thing to share: they are overjoyed. In turn, we’ve been able to send Dan some current photos of his old friends and exchange community info with him… this intercontinental, inter-generational exchange continues to develop, and it’s quite a meaningful experience for us. His longtime friends here in Zombodze are now our newest friends, welcoming us to Zombodze with open arms.
So thank you, Dan—siyabonga kakhulu, umfanfigile!
The first time we visited Zombodze we walked into the carpentry workshop and met the carpenters, a young man and an older man. When the older man learned that we were PCVs, he pulled down a framed black-and-white photo from the wall above his workbench and handed it to me. I saw in the photo two men shaking hands in front of a van with the words “Sebenta PC Training” written on its side. One of the men was a Swazi, dressed in traditional Swazi clothes, and the other was a young westerner with a big beard and an even bigger smile. The carpenter told us that the picture was taken back around 1982, and that the westerner in it was Dan Webber, a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d lived and worked here in Zombodze—and whose projects included constructing the very building in which we stood. In fact, all the buildings in that complex of workshops and stores are the result of Dan’s outstanding partnership work with the community.
As I held that picture and listened to our friend translate the carpenter’s account of how much Dan did for him and the community, I felt myself apart of something larger, and I knew, standing there, that I was right where I wanted to be. And though I’d already been in training in Swaziland for a few months, I think that might have been the moment my personal Peace Corps experience began: The gray-bearded carpenter (Mkhulu Twala is his name) returned the picture to its place on his wall, told us he was happy we’d arrived, and invited us to come visit him any time. We have.
It gets better. I told this story to a fellow PCV a week or so later, and she told me that in fact Dan Weber was on Facebook and had contacted some Swaziland PCVs regarding his old community of Zombodze. Later she gave us his email (thanks, S.), and since then we’ve been in direct contact with Dan (I think he even reads this blog—hi Dan!). He’s passed us some photos and an account of his time here back in the day (1981-83), including pics of Mkhulu Twala and other people in the community that he’d befriended and worked with. His experience in Zombodze was incredible—Dan built his own home here and he could speak fluent siSwati upon leaving, and the results of his community development work endure.
So we’ve been able to share those photos Dan sent us with Twala the carpenter as well as others who knew Dan, and we gave them updates about him. And it’s been an amazing thing to share: they are overjoyed. In turn, we’ve been able to send Dan some current photos of his old friends and exchange community info with him… this intercontinental, inter-generational exchange continues to develop, and it’s quite a meaningful experience for us. His longtime friends here in Zombodze are now our newest friends, welcoming us to Zombodze with open arms.
So thank you, Dan—siyabonga kakhulu, umfanfigile!
There are currently about 50 PCVs placed in all 4 regions of Swaziland. If there are any other Swaziland RPCVs out there reading this who’d like to find out if a current PCV is living in your old community, leave us a message and we’ll be happy to check it for you.
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