Q&A: old, earnest prayers

In this entry I’ll try to address some of the questions about our access to basic infrastructure—water, electricity, transportation, that sort of thing. It can be confusing because on the one hand you’ve read about the water shortages and difficulties here but on the other hand our garden seems to be doing okay and we’re not often thirsty… so what gives? I’ll try to explain this, among a few other apparent conundrums.

Question: If there’s such an awful water shortage in Swaziland, how are you growing carrots and tomatoes and cabbage and everything else?

I’ll start with the simple answer, then move on to the more in-depth ones. Basically, it comes down to our easy access to drinking water on the homestead—not “garden” water, but drinking water. This allows us to prioritize our water usage differently than those who must collect and haul ALL their water, whether for drinking or bathing or watering plants. So the water that we collect and haul (when there isn’t enough rain to do the watering for us) can be devoted exclusively to watering our veggies. But the water collected and hauled by homesteads without such an onsite water source must be used according to resource-scarcity prioritization: indoor water uses (drinking, bathing, washing dishes) always trump outdoor water uses (laundry, watering plants and animals). And here’s the thing… about 70-75% of the neighboring homesteads fall into this water-scarcity category of prioritizing. They’re hauling unclean water from surface sources (streams, seeps) hundreds of meters from their homes, and the difficulty of this daily task demands that they only use water for the most essential things. So our homestead’s borehole/water tap located on our homestead (about 10 meters from our home) frees us up to use our “collected” water exclusively for gardens. And we never use the borehole water on our plants (but we do use it for laundry). That’s the micro-view reason. Now I’ll pull the camera back a little and offer some broader views of the situation.
There are two main seasons here in Swaziland: a cool, dry one (winter) and a hot, wet one (summer). Winter months are generally from May-November (ish) and summer lasts from December-April. There is actually a fall and spring too, but they’re quite short and not nearly as distinct as the ones we get in, say, Ashland, OR or Silvis, IL. So most people just refer to the dry season and the wet season.
We’re currently in summer, the hot, wet season, so rains come more frequently than in winter months (along with plenty of thunder and lightning). But Swaziland is full of different climates, and while one place gets rain another place just around the corner gets none. Even within our own chiefdom, there is a “lowveld” region that’s lower in elevation, much hotter, and much much drier. There aren’t any community gardens over there because there isn’t enough accessible water to keep them up—and they get only a fraction of the summer rains that we get. They are only about 30 minutes’ drive down the dirt road from our garden.
Entire regions of Swaziland are facing prolonged, severe drought for the past 5-10 years or so. The Lubombo region is most widely effected by this ongoing drought. The soils have been devastated and their old water sources are depleted. It just stopped raining with any frequency (or volume) over there, and people are literally starving. Add to that rampant poverty and unemployment and the worst HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world, and Lubombo is truly suffering. That region is only about an hours’ bus ride away from us. That’s one of the problems with having no large-scale water-collection and delivery systems: while one neighbor might have access to drinking water, another one just over the hill can’t even grow beans.
We have PVC friends living in Lubombo communities right now, and I’m pretty sure they’re not growing large gardens. We are fortunate that Zombodze gets rain during the wet season—that used to be true for all of Swaziland, but now it’s very regional. In general, the highveld regions get plenty of rain, the midveld (where we live) gets enough in certain areas, while the lowveld gets little to none at all. So the lower the elevation in Swaziland, the greater the drought and human suffering.
That’s the bigger picture. Here’s the more localized, Zombodze picture. The trick with gardening around here is this: plant the seeds just before summer begins and struggle for a while to water the little guys. That way, when the summer rains finally come you’ll have seedlings and it’ll be a good time to transplant (if necessary) and get the plants to maturity by around Christmas time—which will allow you to have two full crop cycles before the dry months come again. We’re doing just that; for the first few months after planting we carried heavy buckets of water from a source up the hill to our plot in the community garden, just like everyone else. Once the rains came in late November to early December, we didn’t have to carry the water like that, but instead collected from little spigots inside the garden, which are connected to a stream-fed water trench on the hill above the garden (this little water-delivery system only works when it rains and needs a complete overhaul—one of the projects I hope to do while here). Or we collect the rainwater in a big bucket that we have and use that water on days when it doesn’t rain. In this manner, we’ve been able to grow our veggies, as have about 20 or so others in this garden. There’s a fence around it, so it’s protected from animals as well.
I would point out, however, that the only thing we’ve yet eaten from our own garden are a handful of baby carrots that we thinned last month to make room for other carrots to grow large. So we’re not exactly living off our plants yet—and we’re fortunate not to have to try.
But even in our community garden the water is very unreliable. In fact as I write this, we’re getting the first rain we’ve had in at least 10 days—and our plants have been suffering. The wet season/dry season pattern that everyone relies on to grow food has become so unreliable and unpredictable (especially regarding when the summer rains arrive and the duration between summer rain storms) that people commonly lose their seedlings and crops. It’s one thing to collect and haul water from a few hundred yards away when you’re only needing to water a dozen or so rows of seedlings; but when you have an entire plowed hillside of maize—or when you’ve already transplanted all those seedlings and now have hundreds of separate plants of each variety in many dozen different rows to water—it’s next to impossible to manually water it all. So when the summer rains don’t come, gardens and crops are lost—and most of these gardeners are not doing it for fun; they’re not hobbyists, they’re growing food to live on and to feed their kids (and in countless cases, their dead neighbor’s kids). So not getting rain during the rainy season is really disastrous. We’re not sure which of our plants are going to make it—if it hadn’t rained today we were going to begin trying to haul buckets of water up to the garden, but we wouldn’t have been able to properly soak the dry plants like they needed,
Luckily, maize is a great drought-resistant crop, and it also happens to be the Swazi’s staple food. So with or without today’s rain, the big maize fields probably would not be completely lost. But what suffers with less rain is the size and productivity of the maize crops. Less maize at the end of summer means no surplus to sell for income, and quite possibly food shortages for homesteads during the latter-half of the dry months. It’s important to consider that the two summer crop cycles are, for most homesteads, meant to provide their staple food source for the entire year. Two growing cycles doesn’t leave much room for error… or erratic weather patterns. And it’s also important to point out that where families are trying to live off maize alone, malnutrition is rampant. Veggie gardens provide crucial nutrients that everyone needs and deserves, and yet in times of water shortage (which is at least half the year in Zombodze and all year in worse-off areas) those are the most difficult gardens to grow. Trench gardening, which is a great water-minimal technique perfect for such situations, is being taught by organizations and PCVs in many communities here, and we certainly hope it helps the high malnutrition rates.
Homestead gardens, as opposed to the community garden we’re working in, are even more susceptible to water shortages. Very few homesteads here in Zombodze have a bore hole or underground water tap—in fact, we live on one of only two or three that we’ve seen—and so those families rely on hauling water (buckets, wheelbarrows) for both drinking water and gardening water. Since watering one’s children is far more important than watering one’s cabbage, such homesteads simply do not even try to keep even a modest veggie garden. They plant a crop of maize when the rains come (3 straight rainy days is the sign to plow) and are at the mercy of the weather. Over the past 5 years or so, the weather has shown precious little mercy.
But right now the maize fields have sprouted up all around us. The fields we walk through to go to the schools or the little stores or the community hall or the garden are all striped with green leaves, and along with everyone else here we pray for days exactly like today: rainy and wet. In fact, if you want to pray for Swaziland, pray for rain to fall on parched lands; it’s possibly among the oldest of all earnest prayers, and it’s still quite relevant here.

Question: do you have indoor plumbing or electricity in your home?

We don’t have indoor plumbing but we do have electricity. Two plugs, one in each room, and two lights, one in each room. We bought a small electric oven (larger than a toaster oven but not by much) with two burners atop it. We also have a two-burner propane stove and a tank of propane, supplied to us by the Peace Corps. If/when the power goes out (and it flickers a lot) we can always use the propane. We don’t have a refrigerator, but I keep a little milk container in the main house’s mini-fridge, and that’s been enough so far.
Many PCVs here in Swaziland do not have electricity. It just depends upon what’s available at the site you’ve been assigned to, and you really have no idea what you’ll have (or not have) until getting the assignment. All through training, no one knew anything about their permanent sites—not where it would be or what kind of house structure would be there. Ours turned out to have electricity and a bore hole/water tap on the homestead. We’re thankful for that, but also know that we’d have been fine without such conveniences (in fact we told the staff as much when they asked about what kinds of things we hoped for in a site).
We fetch our water from a spigot located about 10 yards behind our home. We use a couple of large water containers with handles, fill them up and store them under our countertop. Some of it goes in the water filter for drinking, some of it goes in the dishwashing bowls, some of it goes in the little hanging shower bag. There’s nothing particularly complicated or even uncomfortable about this setup anymore, we’re so used to it that I don’t even think about indoor plumbing (except when dreaming up ideas for building a summer rainwater-collection system that would deliver water through a pipe in the wall to our shower area… maybe next year).
And of course we don’t have an indoor toilet, we use the pit toilet latrine out on the edge of the homestead. We share it with the rest of the family.

Question: do you ever get to see any TV?

Our family has a TV in one of the main homes and watches it a lot—one Swazi channel and a handful of South African channels—and that’s the norm for Swazi homes with electricity. We rarely watch anything with them, but I’ll occasionally stop in when I hear a football match playing, or to try and catch a news broadcast. Back in our training village (eKhiza) I used to watch the nightly Swazi news with my homestead father every night, from 7-7:30pm. I wouldn’t understand a word they’d say.
Nowadays we try to get our news from shortwave radio broadcasts and internet sources when in town. I guess we could get a TV if we wanted, having electricity, but honestly, neither one of us misses TV in the least and we haven’t even considered the idea. We do like to get DVDs to watch on our computer, either via care packages (thanks!!) or from trading with other PCVs. There’s quite a movie and books trade going on amongst us PCVs.

Question: how do you get around? By car, by bus, by bicycle?

We either walk or take public transportation. We do not have bikes, though if we’d needed them Peace Corps would have provided money for them. We found that we just didn’t need them in our community because most places we’ll be working are so close to our homestead.
PCVs are not allowed to drive vehicles of any kind while serving in-country—not a car or truck or moped or motorcycle, nothing. Too many fatalities in the past. And Swaziland is not a safe place to drive, anyway. So we rely primarily upon minibus taxis called khumbis to get anywhere that’s too far to walk, like to Nhlangano for grocery shopping. These khumbis are packed with people—I mean, really packed. From Zombodze to Nhlangano it’s cheap, E8 one-way (about 80-90 cents US) and the khumbis run frequently. Most khumbis have a sticker inside that says their maximum capacity is 14 or 15, but they rarely run without 18 passengers. One Sunday our homestead brother’s soccer team hired a khumbi to take them all to a game in a neighboring sub-chiefdom, and we were invited to come along. I saw the same sticker inside—15 passengers maximum—but counted 26 people piled into this thing. Jamie-girl sat on my lap and I hung part of my body out the window. The funny thing is, after the game we ADDED one other guy who needed a ride back to Zombodze. So 26 very sweaty, happy (because we won) guys and exactly one woman (sitting on my lap) all piled into our slow-moving, music-blaring khumbi. There are mooments here when there’s absolutely no mistaking that we are in fact in Africa. That was certainly one of them—and the cool thing was, we also felt at ease and at home among these friends.

We’ve written a big report about the Zombodze community, documenting all sorts of issues from infrastructure to HIV/AIDS issues, and I’ll try and email it as a .pdf to those who are interested. Maybe I can somehow attach it to this blog for anyone to access… we’ll see.

That’s all for now.

Hambani kahle!