OUR DAILY BREAD (or Life in the 1940s)

We said we wouldn’t use this forum for complaints, so consider the following simply vignettes of daily life in Swaziland.

Banking: The bank Peace Corps uses does not have an office in Siteki, so to get money, we walk to the other side of town where an ATM is located in the gas station. Emalangeni are tied, at par, with the RSA rand, and when we want cash, out pops rand. Turns out to be okay because rand are readily acceptable here, but when we go into South Africa (or Mozambique), the lilangeni is not accepted. The rate of exchange seems pretty constant but it has recently fallen to 7.0 rand to the dollar. When shopping, I usually do a quick conversion into dollars and prices seem to be pretty reasonable; that is, until you factor in quality.

Shopping: Back in eMboshini, we had our OneStop grocer, an occasional ‘general dealer’ along the tar road, and several ‘markets’ (produce sold from a plank under an umbrella). Now that we are near a town, the Make (‘maw-gay’) markets are consolidated in a building behind the bus ranks, with overflow along curbside, and ShopRite is THE grocery store. Walking into ShopRite is like walking into a Safeway in the early 1940s. (If you can’t picture that, ask your mother.) There is no brand selection even when you find what you’re looking for. We can’t find mustard or pickles or olives here so we’ll try to find them when we go into the big cities of Mbabane or Manzini. The stock is dusty and we’ve learned to look for rusty and dented cans. There is a very limited selection of spices and those available are impotent. Eggs are a popular item, packaged in various numbers, but with only a bottom ‘egg-crate’. The top is shrink wrapped. They are not refrigerated. We’ve just found butter so we won’t be buying margarine anymore because it resembled some kind of heavy petroleum product. Another popular item is a bag of chicken from the butchery which is labeled ‘7 heads, 14 feet’. We’ve passed. The cuts of meat are not recognizable to us; the chicken seems to be quartered; the ground beef is white with fat. We do indulge ourselves with a good ol’ American comfort food: Various flavored potato chips (from Lays of South Africa), but they only come in 125 gram bags. Checking out means queuing in a line leaving no space between bodies. Leaving ShopRite, Build-It is where we get our hardware. Paints and large materials are on the shelves for the public, but to find tools, brushes, hooks, etc, etc, you need to ask for assistance from someone behind the counter. Finally, we have the Indali stores. This is where you find everything that you weren’t able to find elsewhere—especially if it’s made of plastic. And this is where we need to talk about quality. You won’t find it here.

After all that shopping, there is yet another consideration. All our purchases need to find a way home and that means loaded into our shopping bags and carried back. (I’m still doing weight & balance.) The day we did groceries and bought paint, we got a taxi which only came to E20, so we expect we might do that once a month or so (our ‘Costco’ run.) Meanwhile, we only buy what we can carry which, in turn, means more walks into town, which means more time spent in just the activities of daily living.

Bureaucracy: I mentioned earlier the need of passport photos to get our electricity, to get our library cards (still waiting), and the need to identify yourself for any transaction. When you complete a transaction, the clerk will reach for a dusty ledger and begin entering various entries—using carbon paper; not even NCR paper. (Kids, if you don’t understand these terms, go ask your mother.) Last of all, you know the deal is done when the official stamp is used a couple of times with a decided thump.

Superstition: William Kamkambwa writes only two or three years ago in “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” that he feared for his life because he was accused of witchcraft when there was a drought after he built his windmill. Witchcraft remains one of two reasons for divorce in Sd. Eighty percent of Swazis admit to consulting a traditional medicine man (who consults with ancient ancestors). I’ll have more contradictions next time.