first days in swaziland
June 2
The missionaries that live at El Shaddai say TIA - ‘this is Africa’ - this is strange or hard, this is like no other. The other times I’ve heard TIA it’s been a wry remark from dashingly scruffy actors traipsing about deep, dark Africa. Now it’s from Christian missionaries living and preaching and working here - what surreal words. Mostly because this is Africa - I’m sitting in a guest house surrounded by mountains with tiny homesteads tucked in between the cracks and the Komoti river is running below my window. But also surreal because this place in Africa doesn’t seem so hard at all, if a bit strange. I’m living in a guest house with three adult missionaries. I am sharing a room of bunkbeds with a woman Dale. The room next to ours - very next, the dividing wall doesn’t reach the ceiling - is shared by a married missionary couple named Jerry and Janet. They met on eharmony.com.
The kitchen is full of food - fruit, crackers, eggs, tea. Dale is cooking a chicken roast with carrots and potatos. The water comes from a mountain spring, clear and bacteria-less. I already know what I shouldn’t have brought - ie, the water bottle filter - and what I should have brought - more clothes and skirts for church. Church is tomorrow at eleven. It’s supposed to be like no other too. There is electricity from a generator from 5-9:30. It’s powering my laptop and Jerry’s which also gets Internet. Mine won’t, so I’ll only have Internet once a week when we go into the capital city Mbabane. Buh-ban. That’s a bit disappointing, but it’s reasonable. I’ll type my blogs and my emails, like I am now, while I’m at El Shaddai (the orphanage where I’m staying) and then take them on a flash disk to Mbabane to send. So I shouldn’t be too rushed. I’m going to buy a pay as you go cell phone because they aren’t very expensive and they get reception all over here at El Shaddai. The rates to call home aren’t supposed to be too high - even if I can only call home once a week between that and email once a week I shouldn’t feel too alone. Actually, I don’t feel alone at all. I’m living in a tiny space with three other adults! Privacy diminishes……3983 ft
Basically, it’s not going to be so hard. Heat is the only real loss. Everyone here is keen on having nightly showers (yay!) and Jerry and Janet heat their shower water every night on the stove and I will too. Hot sitting, awkward showers are not so bad. At night it gets cold, but I’m not sure how difficult it is to sleep through it. Margie - a grandmother from California who followed the Lord’s calling to Mbabane - thinks its fine. Chanel, the 18 year old daughter of Charmain and Kallie (the couple who run the orphanage), doesn’t. She grew up in South Africa and is just visiting for awhile - it’s nice to have someone who openly admits to wanting the comforts of luxury and the stability of regular paychecks to the exclusion of devoting life to missionary work. The contrast to everyone else who is happy to abandon such comforts. Margie and Chanel picked me up from the airport in Maphuto (spelling?) today and drove me into Mbabane and then the 45 minutes to El Shaddai. In Mbabane we went to the grocery store which was packed with just the same sorts of foods from home, if less variety (hot dogs, Pepsi, everything) and to the Internet café next door where I was able to send the hasty IM ALIVE email.
Missing my impossible connection in Jo’burg was disheartening and upsetting, but I was able to talk to Dad, reach Charmain and arrange to be picked up at a different time and get on the full flight I was on stand-by for…despite being made to wait around for the flight to close and then being ordered to run across the airport to make the flight. I made it through the ten hour flight with almost no entertainment and now I’m here, not as tired as I should be. Church is tomorrow and then the tentative plan is to go with my housemates to a Swazi glass factory…apparently the one in Africa. They think I’ll be able to get to some of the nature reserves in Swazi. I really want to see the black rhinos and elephants.
I’m less concerned about my research. I feel calmer about it just being here. My disorganization is saved by printers in Mbabane - I can print out all the forms that I should have but was too frazzled to bring. There are households very nearby and they do produce most of their own food. There are adult staffers here who are local and bilingual in Siswati and English and have lots of credibility in the area that can help me with interpreting (hopefully!). This place feeds local children, runs a medical clinic twice a week, sells the locals their dairy milk, educates their children for free (well some of them, not everyone) and provides church services so I’m hoping credibility thrives. In Siswati with English translation. I think that will be one of the small moments of the ‘tremendous humility’ Prof. Lee promised I would cultivate. Being the minority, the one who doesn’t understand and has to be provided for by those more skilled. Either tonight or tomorrow I’m going to try to sketch out some of these practical details with Charmain. What sort of help can be spared to help me interpret when I need; paying them for my room and food; what kind of volunteer hours and work I can do.
I feel very happy to be here. I miss my family like always and I wish I could talk on the phone more to them. I had to say good-bye to Paul yesterday and I miss him. My study abroad is over and I miss England. But I do feel happy to be here. My eyes love to see something different and I’ve never ever seen anything that looks like here. Costa Rica and Slovakia are the closest I’ve come as far as underdeveloped, but a very different looking kind of poor. This is poorer. There are people walking all along the streets sometimes with sacks on their heads. The women’s heads are in colourful wraps. Not to overemphasize the ‘African-ness’ of it - people in Mbabane wear jeans and have comforts, but it definitely looks different. Animals are everywhere. Herds of goats dash across the street and a stubborn, pretty cow moved rather reluctantly out of the middle of the road for Margie’s car. I saw a chicken hurtling down the road at breakneck speed - a chicken running that fast is one of the most delightful and absurd things I have ever seen. People sell fruit and ‘mealies’ (which is roasted maize which is roasted corn) on the side of the road. The land outside of the capital is quiet though, mostly empty. I saw one of the beehive huts with a thatch roof next to the tin house of one of our neighbours. It’s their kitchen - more surreal.
But there is a CD player playing American Christian music here! And a fridge and a stove and laundry in a washing machine every day! Definitely better than I expected. I wish desperately that I had brought books, especially research ones. I need Whiteside and Sen - yes, Amartya Sen has promptly surfaced in famine research. Irony. There are books here, Christian novels. I bought one book in the airport. I want more.
Anyway, I should go. Dinner is almost ready and I have to serenade the crowd with my peeing. Bye!
June 3 - Sunday
Livejournal
I am so DONE with fundamentalist Christians. I’m living in a VERY SMALL SPACE with three of them. There are more, but I don’t live with them so that’s okay. That said, they are lovely - some more than others.
Janet is my favourite and Jerry my second favourite. They are married and very sweet and actually likeable, but even they have that wee touch of insanity. Both widowers, Janet is 61 and Jerry is 74. They met on eharmony.com, communicated (up to 20 emails a day) for nine days. Nine as in less than a week and a half. Then Jerry from Alaska flew to Janet in Hawaii where she picked him up from the airport and then married him. The same day. As in the same day. Self-arranged marriage. But that is ‘a God thing.’ More about God things in a minute. Despite this little fragment of absurdity, Janet and Jerry are lovely. She is Japanese-Hawaiian, effusive and cheerful and substantially less prone to interpreting every blink of the eye as the powerful hand of God pressing a righteous hand upon her eyelid. I thought I was going to walk out of here burning with the fire of God but if I do it will be entirely because of the children and the land and all things external to the den of holiness that is my guesthouse.
Jerry - Jerry is old! I knew he was old, but he’s old as in served in Korea old. He’s so lovable old guy - always rattling off funny associations with any word that strikes his fancy. ‘Do you need the salt shaker?’ …. ‘Shake, rattle and roll!’ And he’s got a lot of stories in there. For instance, tonight I asked him how many children he had and when he said ‘one surviving’ I thought that an accident had happened to a young daughter or some other ordinary demise. What actually happened is she went through a very ugly divorce with the son of a very powerful family and she and her two children disappeared en route to Alaska. That was fifteen years ago - they were never found and the powerful ex-husband never suffered any police scrutiny. Jerry was a pastor until three years ago when he married Janet and they became missionaries. He is strictly religious - Baptist - in a way which I find grating, but tolerable. He is a preacher, so wine is ‘good for cooking, not for sipping!’ and he reeks of the exclusivity of Christianity (in which all people are judged harshly by their religious morals and behaviours) and he is tragically unable to provide meaningful, logical answers to meaningful, logical questions. Again, more on that later. But he is lovable and full of trivia and he devotes his life to God and to serving the desperate (so far, in Swaziland, Malawi and Bangladesh) - but most importantly, he reads books which are not bad Christian fiction. Yes, I know I read some of the Left Behind books. But they were a cultural phenomenon and interesting! Jerry spent today reading a book about power outages in LA and that is enough for me.
Dale - my fifties-something roommate- does read bad Christian fiction and a lot of it. I stupidly mentioned that I wanted to go into town to get some books and she offered me her collection. ‘A story of patriotism, true love and faith’ about two twenty one year olds who fall madly in love with Jesus and themselves. Repeat for stack of books. I know this is secular snobbiness, but I READ. I read as in seriously - I like to read about politics, about war, about cultures, about travel and about religion - but usually it’s Islam because I have a thing for the Middle East. I DO NOT read bad books and I do not read bad Christian books. I know its just her version of the trashy beach read, but you know I usually am reading non-fiction even at the beach. I’m so full of judgment for a Christian kindergarten teacher - I know! That makes me a bad, bad person because she’s out here for six months educating Swazi children and that’s really all you need to know about a person’s character. But she is obsessed with God and now both Dale and Jesus are annoying to me. I don’t want to be annoyed at Jesus! And I’m not, just at his constant, constant, constant reference (mind you, it’s been TWO days).
God made Jerry and Janet marry via Internet. Was it still God if he hacked her up into little bits on the way to the chapel because she married a stranger? God saved Charlene today when she wrecked her car. Wait, that’s more valid. And God called everyone here. I’m okay with that too. But the bloody cock crowing this morning at five am (when I woke up) was probably a trumpet of God.
Ope, Dale just asked me if I’ve led youth groups. I’m no spouter of God-talk and I’m sure it will raise suspicion. Lights just went out. Electricity cuts off when the generator goes off - anywhere from nine to ten, you never know. I’ll have to cut out short since we are all in one big room and typing is rude.
I love to write the negative things first, ack! The kids here are great and it’s so so beautiful and I’m really adoring structured, slow and more thoughtful life. I didn’t even get to the big thing that had me troubled all day about abstinence versus contraception education here. It really upsets me but I can’t let on too much of my comparatively radical liberal nature. I’m already full of secular traces like a belly button piercing, non-Christian books and music, etc. Living with missionaries in Swaziland is the most profound and absurd experience J
The missionaries that live at El Shaddai say TIA - ‘this is Africa’ - this is strange or hard, this is like no other. The other times I’ve heard TIA it’s been a wry remark from dashingly scruffy actors traipsing about deep, dark Africa. Now it’s from Christian missionaries living and preaching and working here - what surreal words. Mostly because this is Africa - I’m sitting in a guest house surrounded by mountains with tiny homesteads tucked in between the cracks and the Komoti river is running below my window. But also surreal because this place in Africa doesn’t seem so hard at all, if a bit strange. I’m living in a guest house with three adult missionaries. I am sharing a room of bunkbeds with a woman Dale. The room next to ours - very next, the dividing wall doesn’t reach the ceiling - is shared by a married missionary couple named Jerry and Janet. They met on eharmony.com.
The kitchen is full of food - fruit, crackers, eggs, tea. Dale is cooking a chicken roast with carrots and potatos. The water comes from a mountain spring, clear and bacteria-less. I already know what I shouldn’t have brought - ie, the water bottle filter - and what I should have brought - more clothes and skirts for church. Church is tomorrow at eleven. It’s supposed to be like no other too. There is electricity from a generator from 5-9:30. It’s powering my laptop and Jerry’s which also gets Internet. Mine won’t, so I’ll only have Internet once a week when we go into the capital city Mbabane. Buh-ban. That’s a bit disappointing, but it’s reasonable. I’ll type my blogs and my emails, like I am now, while I’m at El Shaddai (the orphanage where I’m staying) and then take them on a flash disk to Mbabane to send. So I shouldn’t be too rushed. I’m going to buy a pay as you go cell phone because they aren’t very expensive and they get reception all over here at El Shaddai. The rates to call home aren’t supposed to be too high - even if I can only call home once a week between that and email once a week I shouldn’t feel too alone. Actually, I don’t feel alone at all. I’m living in a tiny space with three other adults! Privacy diminishes……3983 ft
Basically, it’s not going to be so hard. Heat is the only real loss. Everyone here is keen on having nightly showers (yay!) and Jerry and Janet heat their shower water every night on the stove and I will too. Hot sitting, awkward showers are not so bad. At night it gets cold, but I’m not sure how difficult it is to sleep through it. Margie - a grandmother from California who followed the Lord’s calling to Mbabane - thinks its fine. Chanel, the 18 year old daughter of Charmain and Kallie (the couple who run the orphanage), doesn’t. She grew up in South Africa and is just visiting for awhile - it’s nice to have someone who openly admits to wanting the comforts of luxury and the stability of regular paychecks to the exclusion of devoting life to missionary work. The contrast to everyone else who is happy to abandon such comforts. Margie and Chanel picked me up from the airport in Maphuto (spelling?) today and drove me into Mbabane and then the 45 minutes to El Shaddai. In Mbabane we went to the grocery store which was packed with just the same sorts of foods from home, if less variety (hot dogs, Pepsi, everything) and to the Internet café next door where I was able to send the hasty IM ALIVE email.
Missing my impossible connection in Jo’burg was disheartening and upsetting, but I was able to talk to Dad, reach Charmain and arrange to be picked up at a different time and get on the full flight I was on stand-by for…despite being made to wait around for the flight to close and then being ordered to run across the airport to make the flight. I made it through the ten hour flight with almost no entertainment and now I’m here, not as tired as I should be. Church is tomorrow and then the tentative plan is to go with my housemates to a Swazi glass factory…apparently the one in Africa. They think I’ll be able to get to some of the nature reserves in Swazi. I really want to see the black rhinos and elephants.
I’m less concerned about my research. I feel calmer about it just being here. My disorganization is saved by printers in Mbabane - I can print out all the forms that I should have but was too frazzled to bring. There are households very nearby and they do produce most of their own food. There are adult staffers here who are local and bilingual in Siswati and English and have lots of credibility in the area that can help me with interpreting (hopefully!). This place feeds local children, runs a medical clinic twice a week, sells the locals their dairy milk, educates their children for free (well some of them, not everyone) and provides church services so I’m hoping credibility thrives. In Siswati with English translation. I think that will be one of the small moments of the ‘tremendous humility’ Prof. Lee promised I would cultivate. Being the minority, the one who doesn’t understand and has to be provided for by those more skilled. Either tonight or tomorrow I’m going to try to sketch out some of these practical details with Charmain. What sort of help can be spared to help me interpret when I need; paying them for my room and food; what kind of volunteer hours and work I can do.
I feel very happy to be here. I miss my family like always and I wish I could talk on the phone more to them. I had to say good-bye to Paul yesterday and I miss him. My study abroad is over and I miss England. But I do feel happy to be here. My eyes love to see something different and I’ve never ever seen anything that looks like here. Costa Rica and Slovakia are the closest I’ve come as far as underdeveloped, but a very different looking kind of poor. This is poorer. There are people walking all along the streets sometimes with sacks on their heads. The women’s heads are in colourful wraps. Not to overemphasize the ‘African-ness’ of it - people in Mbabane wear jeans and have comforts, but it definitely looks different. Animals are everywhere. Herds of goats dash across the street and a stubborn, pretty cow moved rather reluctantly out of the middle of the road for Margie’s car. I saw a chicken hurtling down the road at breakneck speed - a chicken running that fast is one of the most delightful and absurd things I have ever seen. People sell fruit and ‘mealies’ (which is roasted maize which is roasted corn) on the side of the road. The land outside of the capital is quiet though, mostly empty. I saw one of the beehive huts with a thatch roof next to the tin house of one of our neighbours. It’s their kitchen - more surreal.
But there is a CD player playing American Christian music here! And a fridge and a stove and laundry in a washing machine every day! Definitely better than I expected. I wish desperately that I had brought books, especially research ones. I need Whiteside and Sen - yes, Amartya Sen has promptly surfaced in famine research. Irony. There are books here, Christian novels. I bought one book in the airport. I want more.
Anyway, I should go. Dinner is almost ready and I have to serenade the crowd with my peeing. Bye!
June 3 - Sunday
Livejournal
I am so DONE with fundamentalist Christians. I’m living in a VERY SMALL SPACE with three of them. There are more, but I don’t live with them so that’s okay. That said, they are lovely - some more than others.
Janet is my favourite and Jerry my second favourite. They are married and very sweet and actually likeable, but even they have that wee touch of insanity. Both widowers, Janet is 61 and Jerry is 74. They met on eharmony.com, communicated (up to 20 emails a day) for nine days. Nine as in less than a week and a half. Then Jerry from Alaska flew to Janet in Hawaii where she picked him up from the airport and then married him. The same day. As in the same day. Self-arranged marriage. But that is ‘a God thing.’ More about God things in a minute. Despite this little fragment of absurdity, Janet and Jerry are lovely. She is Japanese-Hawaiian, effusive and cheerful and substantially less prone to interpreting every blink of the eye as the powerful hand of God pressing a righteous hand upon her eyelid. I thought I was going to walk out of here burning with the fire of God but if I do it will be entirely because of the children and the land and all things external to the den of holiness that is my guesthouse.
Jerry - Jerry is old! I knew he was old, but he’s old as in served in Korea old. He’s so lovable old guy - always rattling off funny associations with any word that strikes his fancy. ‘Do you need the salt shaker?’ …. ‘Shake, rattle and roll!’ And he’s got a lot of stories in there. For instance, tonight I asked him how many children he had and when he said ‘one surviving’ I thought that an accident had happened to a young daughter or some other ordinary demise. What actually happened is she went through a very ugly divorce with the son of a very powerful family and she and her two children disappeared en route to Alaska. That was fifteen years ago - they were never found and the powerful ex-husband never suffered any police scrutiny. Jerry was a pastor until three years ago when he married Janet and they became missionaries. He is strictly religious - Baptist - in a way which I find grating, but tolerable. He is a preacher, so wine is ‘good for cooking, not for sipping!’ and he reeks of the exclusivity of Christianity (in which all people are judged harshly by their religious morals and behaviours) and he is tragically unable to provide meaningful, logical answers to meaningful, logical questions. Again, more on that later. But he is lovable and full of trivia and he devotes his life to God and to serving the desperate (so far, in Swaziland, Malawi and Bangladesh) - but most importantly, he reads books which are not bad Christian fiction. Yes, I know I read some of the Left Behind books. But they were a cultural phenomenon and interesting! Jerry spent today reading a book about power outages in LA and that is enough for me.
Dale - my fifties-something roommate- does read bad Christian fiction and a lot of it. I stupidly mentioned that I wanted to go into town to get some books and she offered me her collection. ‘A story of patriotism, true love and faith’ about two twenty one year olds who fall madly in love with Jesus and themselves. Repeat for stack of books. I know this is secular snobbiness, but I READ. I read as in seriously - I like to read about politics, about war, about cultures, about travel and about religion - but usually it’s Islam because I have a thing for the Middle East. I DO NOT read bad books and I do not read bad Christian books. I know its just her version of the trashy beach read, but you know I usually am reading non-fiction even at the beach. I’m so full of judgment for a Christian kindergarten teacher - I know! That makes me a bad, bad person because she’s out here for six months educating Swazi children and that’s really all you need to know about a person’s character. But she is obsessed with God and now both Dale and Jesus are annoying to me. I don’t want to be annoyed at Jesus! And I’m not, just at his constant, constant, constant reference (mind you, it’s been TWO days).
God made Jerry and Janet marry via Internet. Was it still God if he hacked her up into little bits on the way to the chapel because she married a stranger? God saved Charlene today when she wrecked her car. Wait, that’s more valid. And God called everyone here. I’m okay with that too. But the bloody cock crowing this morning at five am (when I woke up) was probably a trumpet of God.
Ope, Dale just asked me if I’ve led youth groups. I’m no spouter of God-talk and I’m sure it will raise suspicion. Lights just went out. Electricity cuts off when the generator goes off - anywhere from nine to ten, you never know. I’ll have to cut out short since we are all in one big room and typing is rude.
I love to write the negative things first, ack! The kids here are great and it’s so so beautiful and I’m really adoring structured, slow and more thoughtful life. I didn’t even get to the big thing that had me troubled all day about abstinence versus contraception education here. It really upsets me but I can’t let on too much of my comparatively radical liberal nature. I’m already full of secular traces like a belly button piercing, non-Christian books and music, etc. Living with missionaries in Swaziland is the most profound and absurd experience J