A LAND OF CONTRASTS

You might have noticed that these posts are written without benefit of a dictionary or a thesaurus, (or sometimes, sleep). We purposely left those things at home, considering our weight restrictions, thinking that we would have any information we wanted at the stroke of a key. Our first mistake. I tried getting pictures out to you again, but after 20 minutes of “your pictures are being transferred” and the power going down twice, I gave up. I think a good part of the problem is trying to push the pictures into the 21^st century from here in the 1940s.

We still marvel at reading your e-mails as a text message on our ‘phones a minute after you send them from 20,000 km away. Meanwhile, we are issued hand-written receipts by the post office and electric company.

My school has a computer lab, but the computers are vintage 1980 (donations) and there is no connection to the internet.

I’ve written about our life style in the Posh Corps and this weekend we’ll be hosting a couple from the Hard Corps who have neither electricity nor running water. We are considered peri-urban but as you get more rural, it’s not at all unusual to lack those utilities.

But the Swazis have good humor, smile easily and have a ready laugh. (There is no siSwati word for ‘friendly’; they’ll use ‘kindly’.) Meanwhile, 69% are classified as ‘poor’ and about 30% are unemployed. Signs of poverty are all over.

Swazis like to dress well and somehow have shiny shoes (in this dust). But there is trash and plastic litter everywhere. (Lady Bird Johnson apparently didn’t make it here.)

We were told to not hang our sox or underwear out to dry in public in this conservative culture. We soon learned that nudity is from the waist down. I attended a small, local pageant of school kids. A class of high school girls was costumed in native reed dance costume (which is to say a few beads and feathers above the waist and a very short ‘skirt’ which only covers the front) and performed with a total lack of self-consciousness before an audience including classmates. Can you imagine if…ah, I digress: We live in a contrasting culture.

William Kamkwamba wrote in “The Boy…The Wind”, in 2009, “Only 2% of Malalwians have electricity….Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 p.m., or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.” By contrast, we are so posh, we have revived a stateside routine of watching a movie on a weekend night and stay up way past seven. A fellow PCV has many movies on disc which we borrow and watch on our laptop 12” screen. Contrasts, indeed.