Hello pen pals at Oak Creek School!

We have a bunch of new pen pals: students at Oak Creek School in Cornville, Arizona (which is close to Sedona and Cottonwood), and we just wanted to say: hello and Happy Holdays, Cornville! You all should be getting letters from us very soon. We've enjoyed reading all your letters-- full of great questions and very well written-- and we thank you for writing us.

To everyone else, our friendship with this class is via the Coverdell WorldWise School program, which is offered through the Peace Corps. It gives us a chance to share our expeiences with a classroom back in the US-- and we love it.

Never leave home without your loin cloth

Sanibonani bonkhosi...

As Christmas approaches we're preparing to do something that we haven't done since arriving here: leave the country. We are joining some fellow PCVs and going to South Africa's Kosi Bay National Park, which is on the coast right below the SA/Mozambique border. The Indian Ocean will be warm, the weather will be sweltering, and we'll be going through the bug spray-- and we cannot wait.
I took the above pic while at the local Incwala ceremony, which is kind of hard to explain. It's basically the primary "male" ceremony of the Swazi culture. We went there with some guys from our homestead and community, thinking that we'd just be watching, but in true Swazi style they asked us to join in. There was a part for women as well as men so we both got in line and mimicked the motions of those beside us. It was great but somewhat embarrassing: We had no idea what was going on-- and of course that day was the one time I (Tim) left home without my loin cloth... it's not often that shorts and a T-shirt makes you feel over-dressed for the occasion. Still, it was pretty cool to be included, and next year we'll have some of the chants and "dance" steps down.

Over the past month or so, we've had some actual community development/support work to do. On Thanksgiving we helped out with a local event for pre-school aged kids, most of whom were orphans/vulnerable children from the chiefdom's NCPs. They had a drama competition around the theme of "challenges at home" or something (imagine: tiny kids acting out family dramas like poverty and abuse... it was heartbreaking and adorable). Hundreds showed up, probably because beef was on the lunch menu. More recently, we helped out with a Red Cross food-aid effort in our chiefdom. We helped put the "recipients" list together and then jamie-girl accompanied the MP and other local officials when the Red Cross distributed it. It was quite a scene, with more than 1000 men, women, and children lining up in the heat to receive bags of rice and cooking oil (donated by Taiwan/World Vision this time). It was one of those, "you know you're in Africa when..." moments. And that same day I (Tim) was back at our local umphakatsi (chief's homestead and community gathering center) for a much-anticipated groundbreaking: we're beginning construction on a small community soup kitchen for the NCP (neighborhood care point, which feeds OVCs). The Zombodze MP (Member of Parliament) has so far been great to work with, and he managed to secure some funding for the project. One of our goals for the next few years is to make sure that every NCP site in our chiefdom (there are about 8) has a structure to store and lock up their food and conduct little classes or educational sessions for the OVCs they feed every day. Currently they all have some kind of firepit, but only about half have an enclosed, lockable structure.

Jamie-girl has been working to implement a community calendar of events and has made great progress on that in the past few weeks, as well as an effort to get important health information on the bulletin board of our local Clinic. School will be back in session by the end of January and we'll both be active there, starting up student clubs that target career and life skills guidance counseling, as well as a small-business/Jr. Entrepeneurs project with a partnering NGO.

Training is over, folks-- let the work begin!

It's hot these days. Our garden is growing and expanding-- over 80 tomato plants alone!-- and we have spent some sweaty afternoons weeding the beds, planting corn, and clearing new beds for transplants. Thing is, there's almost always a breeze and it's downright pleasant in the shade. The evenings are beautiful. We do need more rain (haven't had any all week), but otherwise we're fine with Zombodze's summer weather... so far. They say January is blistering. But you know, ever since spending May in India (and a sampling of Phoenix in summertime), nothing has really felt unbearably hot. I think our internal thermometers were permanently altered.

We sure miss everyone this Christmas season and wish you all a very merry holiday season. We'll not likely get back online until after the new year, so everyone take care until then!

Pictures of Home

I thought ya'll might be wondering what our place looks like. We live in a two-room hut. The front room is our library, living room, and kitchen. The back room has our computer desk, clothes closet, bed, and bathroom. It's a small space, but we've managed to make it feel homey and not too cluttered. Let your imaginations run wild if you want to continue to create your own idea of how we are living, but this is the reality for those of you who want a peace of mind!

Alive and Well

Hi everyone! It's been a while, I know. We've been busy. Election nite was spent with fellow PCVs in the capital city, Mbabane, watching the returns come in on CNN (we rented out a hostel with sat. TV) and it was a pretty amazing experience. But since then we've been busy visiting homesteads in our community and collecting information for a big report/study we wrote on Zombodze. That's finished (for now), though the visits will continue-- just not at such a furious pace.


The final component of our PCV training was a week-long event in Manzini: 5 days of training on proposals and project funding options, NGO networking, and just sharing info/ideas with the rest of our PCV family. It was exhausting but oh so fun, as we all got to stay together in a dormitory (at a convent). But now we're headed back to site, and we're excited about the opportunities that this training session revealed.

The rains have arrived and our garden has really taken off. we transplanted beets, tomatoes, and cabbage a few weeks ago, and everything's growing like crazy. It's a lot of fun to be in the garden, and now that the big report is completed we'll be able to hang out there a bit more. the landscape has shed its drab dry-season colorings for beautiful green fields and gardens. And the afternoon thunderstorms make for great sunsets. Lots of new baby goats and cows on the homestead, and fruit trees are beginning to show their potential, especially the peaches and mangoes.

For Thanksgiving we'll be joining some close friends/fellow PCVs at their homestead up in the hills. Their homestead raises turkeys. We have much to be thankful for this year.

More later-- just wanted to let you all know that we're still healthy and happy.

Election season in Swaziland is over

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.

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.

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!

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.