Ministry of Health meeting: accomplished. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been – once it was actually established that they hadn’t switched the meeting to the week before without telling me and that I’d have to wait until November before making my case. (There was a deeply unpleasant 36 hours earlier in the week in which that was nearly true).
I’m not saying I particularly want to repeat the experience any time soon or anything, but I didn’t feel out of my league or like maybe I was about to be unceremoniously kicked out of Swaziland. Also, nobody threw stuff at me and yelled “Dance monkey! Dance!” Which I consider success any day of the week. They want some changes, but nothing terribly drastic. Hopefully me and my awesome research assistants can start interviewing people within two weeks. Hooray! Hooray!
Right now I am in the waiting phase – waiting for final IRB approval, waiting on another potential project to sort itself out, waiting on the move to my new apartment. (Which should happen Friday. Theoretically. Probably. Hopefully.) This waiting phase is how I justified spending most of today in bed watching America’s Next Top Model (the one with the short girls!) and yelling “Ty-ty, you so crazy!” every time she talked about how letting girls who are 5’6 ½” rather than 5’8 model is revolutionizing beauty. Sorry Tyra, they’re still stick thin blonde girls. That particular revolution is a non-starter. My teachers in Steenbok would also point out the high degree of ‘portability’ inherent in a tiny blonde girl who is both a size 0 and 5’4. To this day I don’t know what it means to be “portable,” but based on my experience watching television and travelling around this week, it seems to be a physical trait that both rural South Africa teachers and Sports Illustrated value. So…that must mean something? I wonder if the fact that I am highly transient also counts as being highly portable and therefore ups my sex-appeal? Probably not.
Saturday morning I had a three hour meeting with a gentleman who will be helping me out a lot as an informant in my research project. It wasn’t an actual interview – I can’t do those yet – but more of a chat to establish things. I spent the whole time in fear that he would say something really, really interesting and I wouldn’t be able to use it. Science gives you weird priorities. As I just gave my research assistants an elongated lecture on the importance of confidentiality and privacy and so on, I actually don’t want to write all that much about what we talked about. Suffice to say though, this gentleman is completely fascinating. He and a driver picked me up in town and drove to his homestead. On the way he told me the history of the Swazi military, the University of Swaziland, and the first high school in Swaziland (all of which he was fairly instrumental in starting up) and then pointed out a few trees and other landmarks under which King Mswati II (the current king’s grandfather) and Sobhuza (the king’s father) used to sit or otherwise grace with their presence. So…that was pretty awesome. He also mentioned “that anthropologist lady who came through a few years back. I spoke with her here…she was also from California.” By “that anthropologist lady” he meant a woman named Hilda Kuper*, who wrote essentially the only Swazi ethnography anybody has ever bothered to write, and which people are still citing. (Mostly because it is, in fact, the only comprehensive thing anybody ever wrote, even if that writing happened in the mid-1960s and one or two things have changed a bit since). I’m excited to go back and talk to him for an ‘official’ interview. I have no doubt that it’s going to be a completely fascinating conversation.
*Because Lithuanian Jews by way of southern California really like doing ethnography in Swaziland. This is by far my favorite coincidence of the day.
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