a blog about life in Swaziland that I maybe shouldn't write

When we moved to Swaziland 16 ½ months ago, I (Allison) had aspirations of writing all kinds of pithy, heart-warming, interesting posts about life in Swaziland, the kind that fit the “isn’t cross-cultural living great” narrative. That hasn’t happened. And I’ve tried to sit down and write about why several times (beyond the fact that I have an unfortunate tendency towards unachieved blog aspirations), and I end up with pages of gut-spilling that I’m not quite willing to share with the world. Because the why question touches on the very complicated question of how I feel about Swaziland. I guess I could write about the 90% of life that is utterly mundane (I took my child to play group and talked about recipes with the other moms! grocery store out of sour cream again! you'll never believe what the world’s two cutest children did today! guess what we all have the flu!). Or I could post pretty pictures of animals and landscapes, which I should do more often because I like sharing pretty pictures. Although I have issues with any portrayal of Africa that makes it look like a continent of astonishing beauty and wildlife (which it is) while strangely devoid of people, and too many portrayals of Africa go that way of focusing on the natural beauty while ignoring the people and societies that are actually Africa. Or else I could delve into stories of the actual people and politics and culture and life and death, and that is where things get tricky, in the “if I don’t have anything nice to say maybe I shouldn’t say it” way.

But today I’m home with the kids (guess what we all have the flu! And Joel is out teaching and our helper went home sick) and so it’s just me and the kids in this house of infirmity, and I have nothing else to do but try to make sure we’re all still alive by the time Joel comes home, and think sad thoughts. I’m sure my disposition is not being helped by the fact that my head feels like it’s going to split open any second. Inhibitions that maybe should stay in place, and make me bite my tongue, are perhaps a little weakened by that Tylenol with codeine I dug out of my stash of prescription drugs I should have thrown out long ago (and which is now making me feel a bit loopy). So be it.

I am not having a good “Swaziland week,” as I sometimes say. It’s more than just cross-cultural stress and the thousand things that are different about being here. The fact that the internet doesn’t work and trying to Skype a friend in the US involves multiple dropped calls and rounds of “Can you hear me? Can you hear me NOW?”. Or that I can’t get corn tortillas or good ice cream. Or that there are no county fairs, or any of the other pieces of Americana that I secretly love. (I was watching Charlotte’s Web this morning with William, and it was making me somewhat weepy, which was probably just the Tylenol 3 talking. But I was also getting very nostalgic for county fairs.)

What’s wearing on my soul today is that this country breaks my heart. Let’s just take the past week. A Swazi friend has told me about a loved one who has been diagnosed with HIV (and the fact that 1 in 4 adults here are infected doesn’t make this any less devastating, for each person who gets the diagnosis). Our helper has told us the terrible tale of her brother’s widow, who I was feeling so sorry for six or eight months ago when I heard she had lost her husband and been left with five kids, the youngest just nine months old. This week Lindiwe told me that the mother collected her husband’s pension and then took off to locations unknown in a Prodigal Mother maneuver, leaving her children with an elderly great-aunt who is in poor health and in no shape to take care of five children. The children are apparently doing badly and are sick (to say nothing of being severely traumatized, I would imagine). I don’t know why this story even surprises me, as I have heard many equally sad stories of parental abandonment during my time here, but I can’t get it out of my head. Yesterday I was reading a report that said two-thirds of “orphans and vulnerable children” (which is a whole lot of kids here) don’t have the basics of life, which is defined as one meal a day, two pairs of clothes, and one pair of shoes. (How many of you U.S. parents would feel your kids were doing okay if they had that little?)

And today I opened a newspaper from a few days back, from one of the piles that collect in drifts around our house, to read about the opening of the new airport, just pages away from an article about how 63% of Swazis live on less than a dollar a day. I hope the construction of this airport goes down in history as one of the stupidest, most misguided projects in the history of development. The old airport, which has only 5 flights a day (the same little plane that flies back and forth to Johannesburg), works fine. Those flights are usually not even full; most of us just drive to South Africa. I simply cannot fathom by what logic the king thought it was a good idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (20% of the national budget last year), in this tiny country of a million people, to build a new airport (and name it after himself, naturally), when 63% of his subjects live on less than a dollar a day. (Yes, we have a king here. The powers that be like to prattle on about “monarchical democracy,” but really, it’s Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy.)

Draw your own conclusions about the airport. I see leadership that is drunk on the need for power, significance, and on an obsession with being perceived as “first world,” and chooses to build a glittering edifice that at present doesn’t yet have a single flight, rather than serve the needs of the majority of the population that are outside the king’s circle of power (and frankly, it seems to me beyond the bounds of his concern). The part of the glowing newspaper coverage about the airport that really made me want to vomit was the pictures of the Swazi socialites in their fancy clothes, along with captions about how much they had spent on their dresses, shoes, and handbags. This is a country obsessed with fashion, and every day’s newspaper contains a hefty section filled with pictures of this beauty queen or that socialite, posing provocatively in tiny dresses and high-heels, talking about how they just love being in pageants and their favorite singer is Beyonce and their favorite novel is Shades of Grey (another gem from last Sunday’s paper). Wonderful role models for the nation’s youth, these. I am constantly amazed at how such a tiny country can manage so many beauty pageants and beauty queens and kings. The women who have never won a beauty pageant must feel really bad about themselves. Sometimes just to spice it up, the paper profiles women who are businesswomen or lawyers, but the focus is still invariably on their sex appeal, not their brains or accomplishments. (The point that the U.S. also has a lot of such "journalism" isn't lost on me.) And the major story from any important event, whether the opening of Parliament, a university graduation, or the opening of an airport, is always what people wore. Sex sells, I get it, as do glittery aspirational lifestyles. But how could I not be nauseated at pictures of so-and-so in his $800 shoes or Ms. Blahblahblah in her $350 dress, at the opening of a ridiculous vanity project, when I only had to flip a couple pages of newsprint to read about the desperately poor, who could eat for months on the price of those shoes or that dress.

I have no idea if I have the right to even raise these issues, to criticize. I take seriously the fact that every human society, left to ourselves, is equally far from and equally near to God’s values of justice, righteousness, and peace. In some ways U.S. culture is very far from God’s ideals (we certainly have our share of leaders who are drunk on power and greed), and in some ways Swazi society is very near (being here makes me recognize that American society is really, really not very much into sharing). When we succeed in reflecting the shalom of God’s ways, it is only because He has been at work, and is nothing for us to feel proud or culturally superior about. I also take seriously Jesus’ admonition to recognize the plank in my own eye (it’s not just that America has a plank but *I* have a plank) before I tell my neighbor about the splinter in his.

So I guess I am just expressing that this is the place that I live, and this is the injustice that I see, and sometimes it makes it hard for me to “like” living here very much. It is hard to see people suffering, and to see the rich oppress the poor. It is hard to see so much death. Mixed into all this is my guilt that I am a rich person living in a poor country and really not doing very much about righting the wrongs here. I know that God loves Swaziland, and that He calls me to seek the good of this place as passionately as I seek the good of my country, my hometown, my family and friends. I believe that love must involve action. But I don’t know how to squeeze time out of my schedule that is already so full with being a mom, wife, and PhD student, to do something, besides giving a little money here and there. I don’t know how to leave my comfortable, wealthy white enclave to engage with people who are different than I. The family of widows and orphans that we have tried to build a relationship with has lied and stolen from us, and we’ve effectively ended the relationship. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, I just know that helping real widows and orphans is a lot more complicated in real life than it seems it should be in the abstract.

There’s this homeless man who can often be found wandering the streets around my office (which is not far from our house). He dresses in raggedy clothes and has grizzled hair and I’m pretty sure has serious mental health issues. My heart hurts every time I see him, and although I don’t feel safe talking to him (if he even understood English), I usually pray for him as I pass. A few days ago it was cold and drizzly, and I saw him out roaming the streets as I was driving home from my office to the house. Joel was going to get right back in the car to go somewhere, so I very quickly threw together a jar of hot tea with milk and sugar, and a couple sandwiches, for Joel to give him. I just wanted to do something small to make his day less bleak, and recognize his humanity. But in the five or ten minutes between when I saw him and when Joel drove back down the same road, the man disappeared, and in spite of driving around the neighborhood for a few minutes, Joel never found him. This pretty much summarizes how I feel here. I don’t know what to do to help my neighbor.

A Swazi who I like and respect asked me today if I liked Swaziland, and I stumbled a little as I usually do because I can’t just give a simple “yes”. I can say that it’s been a wonderful, slow-paced place to be a family with small children, in our comfy expat bubble. I can say I’ve made some true Swazi friends, and met a lot of people I deeply admire and respect. People like a friend in our Bible study, who sat there a couple weeks ago and told us about how he was a different kind of father and husband than his father, who had seven wives and fifty-two children who he had no relationship with. Our friend has chosen to make his wife his best friend and “soulmate”, to support her in her career, to wash the dishes and care for his children, in spite of pressure from elders in his family that he’s not being a true Swazi man. So please know that for every mother who abandons her children there is a father who is resisting family pressure and generations of precedent to be an everyday hero to his wife and kids.

Please don’t take this as a call to think about Swaziland in a negative light; if that’s your reaction, sit yourself down for some plank-spotting in your own heart and backyard. Please do take it as a call to pray for righteousness, justice, and peace to come to this nation, as a call to be grateful for the prosperity and security you enjoy (which you largely did nothing to deserve or earn for yourself), and even as a call to find practical ways to help people who have less than you do. And please pray for us, that we would find ways to contribute to the good of this society where we’ve been planted for a little while, and learn to love Swaziland as much as God does.

And if you waded through all of that, you definitely deserve some pretty pictures.

view from our yard-- there are so many beautiful flowering trees this time of year


double rainbow!

on a Saturday hike