Life in a small PCorps Country... Bigger is not always better.

This is about the time last year when I received my invitation from the Peace Corps to come to Swaziland. I remember searching for blogs wanting any advice people were willing to give and insight on what it would be like to live in a country that I had to google to make sure that it actually existed. Now that I am the one who is writing the blog I don't really feel qualified to offer advice, but I still remember the first words of advice that were given to me by a volunteer in the group before me. They told me that I was very fortunate that I was coming to Swaziland and that it is a great country(a biased answer, I thought). And then they said that the country is really small which is a huge benefit to us PCVs because traveling to the *big* cities and other PCV site is comparatively easy. It only takes a couple hours to travel from one end of the country to the other using public transport. This is a huge benefit not only for my social life and mental health... living in the bush is not always easy as you can imagine and being around the people who are going through the same things as me really helps. The other benefit of being in a small country is that I can travel to other PCVs to see the work they are doing to help inspire the work I am doing in my own community. I have visited a Volunteer's English Club who were writing a skit about HIV and stigma, I have played volleyball with another Volunteer's youth club, I have visited craft stores to get ideas for crafty boMake in my own community, I have seen awesome gardens and furniture built by my fellow PCVs. I have gained a lot of inspiration from them for sure.
Last week we spent a week in Mbabane, the capital city for a project development workshop with our Swazi counterpart, followed by a grief and loss workshop. I love going to workshops because it means I get to shower and I don't have to cook! But after last week I am back at site clean, well fed, and feeling really connected to my fellow PCVs and in a bigger country with more volunteers I don't think such a connection and friendship could be cultivated. So if you are an invitee, we are really looking forward to having you in the family. To my friends and family, you are keeping me well fed with your care packages. I really appreciate them and my friends here are all jealous on how awesome and generous you are. Mom and Patty are coming to visit next week. I am so excited and interested in hearing their impression of life here!
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HIV Testing Event

What a successful week!  I am serving in the Peace Corps as a Health/HIV Educator and up until now I haven’t been doing much of that, but that is changing now.  The Clinton Foundation (Bill Clinton’s organization) has taken an interest in my area of the country.  They trained about 50 Swazis in HIV Education in order to send them back to their communities to get their peers to understand the advantages of testing and then take an HIV test.  The target was to reach 16-19 year olds since data shows that in the last 3 months only 3 males in that age group got tested in my entire inkundla (like a county).  I was shocked by that small number since this is the country with the highest HIV prevalence in the world and an inkundla is not a small area.  I definitely expected more than 3 people!

My friend, Mfanakhona at the event Saturday

One of my friends who was also the driving force behind the Youth Club that we are starting was one of the people chosen to go to the training held by the Clinton Foundation.  They were tasked with mobilizing the youth to get tested and they asked me to help.

On Monday we went to two high schools and a primary school to ask the head teachers for time on Wednesday to have an audience with their students so we could talk about an HIV Testing event that would happen on Saturday.  I was surprised how easily they said yes and how accommodating they were.  Within a 5 minute meeting the Head Teacher gave us a 3 hour block and he offered a PA system and we asked to come in 2 days and that was ok.  I don’t know how principals schedule guest speakers in American schools, but this seemed too easy.  Being a foreigner here seems to give all of the projects legitimacy.  In America, foreigners are not treated the same.

Wednesday morning we arrived at the big high school, around 900 students enrolled there!  We started with introductions, then one of the guys talked about how HIV is transmitted and its myths, and then I spoke for 30 minutes about the advantages of HIV Testing.  After I spoke we had time for questions, and those kids had some very thoughtful questions.  They know about HIV, they know people with it, and people who have died from it, but there is still a huge stigma attached to it.

Then in the afternoon we spoke to the small high school and the Grade 7s of the primary school.  The purpose of going to all the schools was to mobilize the youth to come out for testing on Saturday.

Some of the people who finished their test on Saturday.

 

We must have done a good job mobilizing because Saturday’s event was awesome!  We held it at the primary school.  There was a DJ playing music, three tents for doing the testing, food, and prizes!  They cooked a traditional meal that they eat during important meetings: cow head, feet, and stomach… I went hungry, but they all seemed to love it!   At the end of the event, 72 people from my community were tested!!  Success!

Vusi preparing the cow's head

Cow head, feet, and stomach with lipalishi

They all seemed to love it... I went hungry...

Google Earth is so cool!

If you don't have it, you need to download it.  I have been in the Peace Corps office the last couple days for yet another training, so I have had a lot of time to bum around on the internet.  Free Wifi!  Google Earth can give you a better idea of the difference in how people live around the world.  I like to show it to my Swazi friends and Swazi kids because their sense of space and land is so different than in America.  Owning cows is a big deal here.  The more cows, the more wealth.  It is quite common for people to ask me about my cows in America.  They don't understand how people live in houses with a front yard and maybe enough room for a dog to run around the back yard, but that's it.  There are no pastures to keep your cows in the suburbs of Syracuse, NY.  And to be fair, I still don't understand how they can live with so much space.
Obviously the scale of the pictures aren't exactly the same, but the difference is pretty crazy!

North Syracuse with the airport on the bottom right and you can see the NS Junior High with it baseball diamonds in the center.

Sinceni: my home is ton the bottom right and the main road to town is that dirt road along the left side.  The  L-shaped on the bottom left building with the red top has a butchery and a pool table and a shop right above that.  Only 4 people live on my homestead which looks huge compared to the others around me which have more than 10 people living there.

A closer look at my home.  My house is the bottom right and my bathroom is the small one on the bottom left.  All of the trees are fruit trees: mangos, papaya, oranges, guava, bananas.

Knitted Toys

One of the things that has struck me since being in Swaziland is how the children play and the toys they play with.  Generally the kids have no toys and are forced to create their own.  It is common to see soccer balls made out of a bunch of plastic bags and toy cars out of dried mud or scrap fencing wire.  And it is uncommon to see a toy that was bought from an actual store.  So I took it upon myself to create some toys to give as Christmas presents to some of the girls that are frequent visitors to my hut.  Thanks to everyone that sent me yarn in care packages.  All of the yarn was given to me and I still have plenty left to make even more fun things!  Hopefully I will be able to use it in my time here.  I started knitting these in September and had them finished for Christmas. To stuff them, I bought a pillow, ripped it open, stuffed the animals, and sewed them all together. It took me four months to make these four stuffed animals.  Now four girls have a toy of their very own.

The monkey is 2.5ft tall.  He took forever to knit!

I made his teeth out by crocheting plastic bags that I cut into strips to make a sort of plastic yarn.

The girls love this doll!

This was the first one I made :)

Handicrafts, Soccer. and Youth Club

I have been meaning to blog, but I have had some computer issues.  Shopping in Swaziland is definitely different and not as fun as shopping in America, mostly because of the 2 hours of the crammed public transport on a dirt road carrying all your purchases make it feel more like a pain in the neck than a stress relief.  With that being said, however, I can find everything I need here, it just takes more effort.  So when my computer broke there is no BestBuy to take it to and no place with a hundred computers lined up ready to be compared and contrasted and then once one is chosen it can taken home that same day.  Long story, short: my old computer’s display broke and they can’t get the part in Africa, so thanks to my Mom’s and Bill’s generosity I can type today!  Also a shout out to Dad, Joy, and Ash and the Kraemer family for the care packages.  You all make me feel so special and keep me well stocked with American junk food!!

I am so happy to have a computer back, I have so much work to do.  Right now I am working on a bunch of projects.  I am working on writing a grant to fund an income generating garden project for the caregivers of the orphans and vulnerable children who are fed at my community’s 6 Neighborhood Care Points (half of my NCPs were built by a former PCV!).  My NCPs are lucky enough to still get some food donated from World Food Programme, so this garden project will help to diversify the meals and will help to create sustainability if WFP pulls out.  The income generated from selling the surplus will be put towards dishes, soap, and the caregivers’ other needs to run an effective NCP.

Outside of grant writing, I have been keeping myself busy learning how to make Swazi crafts.  A couple months ago, well before Thanksgiving, I sent e-mails out to some of the crafting shops in the country that support women’s groups in the rural areas.  I got two e-mails back almost immediately: one was a mailer domain/email address doesn’t exist..ugh and the second was very nice but said that they already support more women than they can really handle.

I got no response from the third.  I assumed it was lost in the cyber world, but I got a phone call the week after being home from my Mozambique vacation about 3 weeks ago from Tintsaba Crafts.  They wanted to meet boMake Craft group!  They are looking to train and take on more women so they called me!  How awesome is that!!!!

On Friday they were going to be in my Region.  They asked to me to bring some of my women to a meeting place about an hour bus ride from where we stay.  I went with 2 boMake and we arrived early since the bus schedules aren’t so reliable in the afternoon.  Have I mentioned that these are the women that taught me how to make the baskets?  They speak only siSwati and had to figure out how to teach me left-handed while they all are right-handed, pretty impressive I think.  The Tintsaba people arrived late since their meeting before ours ran late.  I was freaking out a little while waiting, what if they don’t come and every other ‘what if’ going through my head.  Anyways, they showed up an hour and half late (and we were there an hour early!)   They had the meeting speaking in siSwati.  That is the tough part of living in rural Swaziland.  My siSwati will never be good enough to understand whats going on completely.  So I only know as much as could be translated to me. 

My craft group used to work with a woman who sold the baskets in America, but more than a year ago they lost contact leaving my craft group without a market to sell to so by connecting them with Tintsaba will open a new market for them to sell to.  But there was an issue that came up.  Tintsaba alleges that the woman my boMake used to work for stole product from Tintsaba to sell in America and that issue is still unresolved which could jeopardize my boMake’s relationship with Tintsaba.  When this was translated to me my heart started to break.  I barely know how doing business works in America let alone in a 3^rd world African country.  All hope is not lost, but the reps need  to speak with the owner of the shop who wasn’t at this meeting to see how they can remedy the situation that happened in the past and take on my boMake’s group.  So please keep your fingers crossed for a favorable decision for the women of my community.  Working with Tintsaba would be a great opportunity for my women!

After the meeting and another hour long crowded bus ride, standing the whole way home it was already time to head to the soccer field.  I have been spending most of my evening watching soccer practice.  Everyday more than 20 guys from my neighborhood ages ranging from late teens to late 20s have soccer practice on a field down by the river.  I played with them a couple times, only enough to show them that I know how to play.  I don’t play with them anymore.  I see it like this: I struggled to keep up with the girls when I played 10 years ago, so trying to keep up with these male African athletes now would be a joke.  I am not ashamed to admit that.. haha.  But regardless of whether I play or not these guys are my friends now and it makes me feel safer in my community with them around because I know they will look out for me.

I am telling you about my soccer team because before I went on my holiday vacation in Mozambique the Youth Club that I helped to start was planning its first event, a sports day.  The committee asked me to have my team come to a planning meeting.  I asked them and they showed up even though it was a wicked hot day and not many others came.  I was so happy!  So my Youth Club planned the Sports Day for New Year’s Eve while I would be away.  When I came home from vacation and heard a report on the event: five soccer teams, volleyball, and netball.. success!!!  My soccer team did not win, but one of my player said to me “we showed up in numbers.  We couldn’t have something you were involved with be a failure.”  My heart melted.  A lot of the time I don’t know what purpose I am serving by being here, but this made me feel so validated.

Mozambique Vacation - Happy New Year Everyone!

 It is always nice to come back to my own comfortable bed after a vacation, especially one where I spent most nights sleeping in my tent on the beach in Tofo, Moz.  I guess it could have been a lot worse, haha.  The last 10 days have been the most adventurous fantastic time of my life.  It was a vacation for the memory books!  I will give you some of the highlights.

Our vacation started on Dec 23, when half our travel group met in Manzini, Swaziland so that the next morning we could get an early start traveling to Maputo, Moz.   While in Manzini, I stopped at Baker’s Corner for a donut, the best way to start a morning, and then went off to buy my first ever bikini to celebrate 35lb weight loss since June! 

The next day’s travel to Maputo went pretty smoothly, especially considering that it was down pouring rain the whole time, that’s one way to test the water-proofing on a tent.  The tent held up, and for the most part this was the only time the whole vacation with notable rain, we had great weather!

The 8 of us spent Christmas Eve and Christmas in Maputo, the capital city.  I had to keep repeating to myself that it was Christmas.  Without family it didn’t feel very festive, but it was unforgettable nonetheless.  The first night we walked to a restaurant on the beach for drinks and the next night we spent at the bar in the hostel we were staying at.  Most of the city was closed down because it was a Sunday and Christmas, so I don’t have the most accurate impression of the city but I got to experience with good food, a bottle of wine from the duty-free shop, and among good company.

We had direct transport door-to-door from Maputo to Tofo Beach.  My friends turned the 8hr bus ride to the beach into party bus with the bottles of vodka they bought at duty-free.  My liver cannot keep up with theirs and I wasn’t taking any chances during such a long bus ride on the roads of a 3^rd world country.  I was busy taking in the sites of Mozambique.  It is so different than the mountains of Swaziland.  The country is flat and huge.  Everything is so much more spread out than Swaz.  The fields look more like big commercial farms I am used to from the US instead of the subsistence farming here except that there are still women with hoes weeding the fields by hand.  Most houses in Swaziland are made from cinderblocks and a few are made from sticks, mud, and rocks; but in Moz the majority of the houses were made almost completely out of coconut branches/leaves.

Tofo Beach was a little bubble of paradise.  White sandy beaches, beautiful blue Indian Ocean, sitting on the deck reading a book, sipping fruit juice, and background noise a mixture of something like Dave Matthews Band or Jack Johnson coming from the speakers behind me and crashing waves in front of me.  Tofo is generally a quiet relaxing vacation, but it is a hotspot for New Years.  We were there long enough to experience it both ways.  The beginning of the week was really chill.  Most days we sent under a cabana in a hammock on the beach with local kids begging us to buy the bracelets they make or bread and samosas. Nights were full of drinking, dancing, chilling, concerts on the beach with coconut homebrew, ridiculousness and all kinds of trouble!

One of the days we went on an ocean safari to snorkel with whale sharks, the biggest shark in the world but they have no teeth.  However, the sharks didn’t want to come out to play, but the dolphins did!  WE got to roll backwards off the boat to swim with so many dolphins; I couldn’t count all of them!  I was swimming within 4m of them.  I got nervous at one point.  Three of them were swimming right at me.  All I saw was their huge size, the gray on top and white on bottom and I was second guessing whether it was just friendly dolphins in the water and not a scary shark with teeth!

New Year’s Eve was pure chaos and crazy partying.  Hard to believe the beach that was so peaceful a few days ago is now party central.  Dancing in sand is challenging by itself, but it is brought to a whole new level when packed in with hundreds of others.  They set up a DJ booth and a stage for live music on opposite sides of the dance sand floor.  NYE music consisted of an awesome Mozambiquan Drum band and DJs playing house music, bass blaring for the rest of the night and throughout the morning.  Every night the music was going til 5am except NYE where the party started at 10pm and lasted til 10:30am.  I went to sleep at 2:30a and woke back up at 4:30a to rejoin the party just after the sun came up.  I put my bathing suit on, watched the people who were crazy enough to still be dancing, took a nice long walk on the beach, and then came back to sit at the water with the tide rising, trying to figure out my New Year’s Resolution and to be hit on by Mozambiquan men.  At 7am I was thinking of everyone back home who was just then celebrating your New Year and hoping that yours was half as memorable as mine.

WE pulled another all-nighter the next night in order to start our journey home at 3am. I arrived in Mbabane, Swaziland around 5pm completely exhausted from a whole day of travel and khumbi drivers trying to overcharge us the whole way, but no other major incidents.

After one night in Mbabane decompressing with the other Volunteers who also happened to be there and a good night’s sleep, I am now back at my site and in my bed, so comfortable after so many days in sand!

Happy 2012 everyone!  I think it is going to take the whole year to get all the sand out of my stuff, not such a bad thing.  Here’s to a year full of many more memories!

Happy Birthday to me!

My 24^th Birthday was this weekend!  It will definitely be a birthday I will never forget, my first Swazi birthday!  Birthdays are a way of looking back and seeing how far we have come in life.  Only two short years ago I spent my birthday finishing a college paper just in time for exam week, track practice spinning in circles 20lb weight throw in my hands, and then after practice rushing through a blizzard to get ready for he Athletic Formal.  Wow, life has changed!

This year on my birthday, I had a successful event.  We are starting a youth club in my community, so the event’s purpose was to select the committee of leaders for the group.  The elected a female to be the chairperson! And they are looking forward to using this group to help organize social events, sports teams, and for community and business development.  I am really looking forward to working with this group!  After the meeting we all went down to the Butchery, where we bar-b-qued up some meat and pap and they all sang Happy Birthday to me!

Sinceni Youth Club

On Sunday, I ventured out to Simunye Country Club to meet up with other Volunteers who were also celebrating their birthdays.  This country club has beautiful grounds, grass everywhere! So green! And a sprinkler system to water the grass, hard to believe I am still in Swaziland.  I went swimming, ate a cheese burger, had a chocolate milkshake, free wifi, skyped with Patty, and a hot shower!  Successful day, I think so!  And if that isn’t good enough, I spent the night at Ryan and Addy Hall’s site (Ryan and I share birthdays).  Their family came to Simunye for Ryan’s birthday and they brought a cake, so I got my birthday cake after all!

The two weeks after Thanksgiving were really hard for me.  I was really excited and full of ideas after In-Service Training and then I got back to site and within a week everything started shutting down for the summer holidays and it was quite shocking o go back to living the hut life after spending a week with running water, prepared meals, and Americans all over the place.  So this weekend was badly needed and I am now out of that funk.  It’s amazing how little it takes to make me happy again: friends, a shower, and a chocolate milkshake.

Now I am really looking forward to some traveling, as I will be spending Christmas and New Years on the beaches of Mozambique.  It’s going to be a white sandy Christmas!