Jezebel writes gooder than I do

"Having a man or group of men talk about your body while you're just trying to go about your business is not just annoying—it sends the message that you don't have the right to be left alone, which makes the streets feel less safe."


I like it when I come across a sentence that articulates perfectly something I've been trying to sort out in my own head for ages.  As much as I love living here, and most of the time loved living in South Africa, and had the time of my life travelling after peace corps -- the incessant cat calling and attention is maybe the absolute worst part about being a woman here.  And it makes you feel like a jerk, because nobody is actually harming you or threatening harm (at least. not overtly).  I think I need to think this through a little bit more, so I'll come back to it.  But in the meantime:

Read more: http://jezebel.com/5677765/can-a-city-effectively-ban-catcalls#ixzz13xuQI1al


(the article is about NYC, not Africa, but whatevs)

Descriptions

A while back I said I didn’t want to really get into describing Swaziland and Mbabane because anything I said would almost certainly be wrong.  That’s probably still true today, but I’ve been here for two months now and I’m willing to take a stab at it. 

First of all, Swaziland is beautiful.  I feel I have some authority to say this, being born and raised in one of the most beautiful (if also most boring) places on the planet to start with. 

            The part of the country that I’m living in is nothing but mountains – I think I already mentioned that this place is like living in an MC Escher painting, where everything is uphill from everything else.  Which is a pain when you’re on foot, but it also means that you’re constantly looking down into a valley, or up at some gorgeous hilly vista.  Right now it’s the beginning of the rainy season, too.  So all of those valleys are green and lush, and the mountains are beginning to be covered in wild flowers.  The dirt is red – somebody told me that the insane amount of iron and other minerals in the ground means that Swaziland has more lightning strikes than any other place on earth.  The red dirt and green bush together make for color so vivid it seems a little bit like you’re looking at a matte painting instead of an actual landscape, and in the late afternoon, when the light hits just right, you can look down over pasturelands or valleys and watch the shadows of clouds roll across all that color.  In the middle of the morning, when it just starts to get warm, I like to walk down the road and smell the humidity and steam coming off the banana trees, and look down the red dirt roads with the bright green weeds and tiny purple flowers along the side as they meander off into the residential parts of the back of the city. 

            A little river runs through most of the city, and while studying public health has ruined me a little bit, and all I can think when I see it is “mmm…giardia and bilharzi…gotta get me some of that!” I still like living in a place where an actual river runs through town and splits the shopping center in half.  No matter how polluted, tiny, and possibly disease laden.

            Swazi people are very friendly – to the point where some Americans might consider their friendliness to be circling back around to rudeness.  The phrase ‘none of your business’ is not a Swazi concept.  Who you are, where you are going, and what you’re up to in the country is the business of anybody who wants to know it and a totally normal conversation to have walking to town or sitting in a kombi.  This is the way it was in South Africa too, of course, but I feel like there’s a slightly different flavor to it here.  In Steenbok I was fascinating because I am American white.  I often felt like the fascination and questions I got in South Africa, especially rural South Africa, had more to do with the genuine curiosity of novelty.  People weren’t really enquiring into a person so much as a strange phenomenon.  Here, the questions are almost identical (if less fervent), but it has more to do with the fact that I stand out and am therefore…slightly more obvious to start up a conversation with.  But this is a big city, with lots of NGO workers and ex-pats and Swazis of European descent, and I feel like my skin color is slightly less of a big deal.

            In some ways though, I miss the experience of living in a village.  Again, you can pry my shower and internet out of my cold, dead hands, but this feeling of living in an ex-pat bubble is so strange.  In Steenbok I felt like my very existence was like a lightning rod for the absurd.  All I had to do was walk out the front door and something hilarious/awkward/disconcerting was basically guaranteed to happen.  And that felt real.  It was grinding to constantly be on show, and exhausting to never be able to show people that I was feeling sad, or angry, or frustrated (maybe that sounds strange and I could have, but at the time it never felt like an option), but it was strangely honest in a way too that I haven’t been able to replicate living in Mbabane.  In Steenbok, I was a part of something.  I was owned, or at least known.  In my own way – even if it was different than everybody else’s – I belonged there.  And I felt like I had earned that.  Don’t get me wrong, I think this study is amazing and I’m working hard and don’t think I’m wasting anybody’s time out here – but I’m not sure what I’m earning right now.

More narratives for HIV prevention

Kenyan video game developers have partnered with Warner Brothers, PEPFAR, and "a behavioral change expert" to make a video game about HIV.  The part where they also use it to collect information on current attitudes and behavior towards HIV and safe sex is a little bit problematic if they haven't made it very clear to people that their answers are being tabulated and what not.  But still, pretty cool.

Apples and Bananas

“In view of the importance of the study, and the fact that the study is in accordance with ethical and scientific standards, the committee therefore grants you authority to conduct the study in Swaziland.”

I have been granted authority.  Boom.

My essential follow up question to this is: Does dropping banana bread off at the Ministry of Health count as a bribe?  What if I only dropped it off after I get my letter?  Because step two is approval through Johns Hopkins (hopefully this will take under two months – probably more like 3-5 days).  I’m willing to overnight some banana bread, if that’s what it takes.  I was really hoping to start interviewing people by this weekend, but it looks like that’s not going to happen.  I’m strongly considering hopping on a 25 hour bus and going to Cape Town to drink some wine instead.

I don't want a pickle

First, I should probably mention that when I said I would be here until February, what I actually meant was July. Sometimes I confuse those months.  I want to make very certain that 2010/2011 remains as winter free as possible.  I think I'm still traumatized by snowpocalypse.  (aka snowmageddon, aka snOMG, aka Snowtorious BIG).

Second, you want to talk about culturally relevant narrative forms making a difference to HIV in southern Africa?  I present to you porn with condoms.  In SeSotho.

Third, I have my very own internet connection again.  Yay!!  It very much happened on Swazi time, which means I had to spend two days sitting in my apartment and getting hung up on by Swazi telecom employees, while being told that the person would be there to install it "soon" and so I should be sure not to leave the apartment so as not to miss him.  Obviously it was not fully set up until about 6pm on the day after they told me that it would certainly be set up by.  And then there was a giant thunderstorm and the connection went out almost immediately following but...you know.  I have internet.

Still no letter from the ethics committee saying that I can interview people ("I'm sure by the end of the week" = "I hope you've got plenty of Glee reruns to keep you busy.") but on some level I'm sure its good for me to be adjusting to Swazi time.  Probably.  Unless I pull all my hair out and come back to Baltimore just in time for my scalp to be horribly frost bitten by whatever god awful thing winter decides to throw at me in revenge for skipping out on him for a year.

While sitting around on Swazi time with the internet installation dude, waiting for somebody from the internet installation office to call him back with a password I needed to access the internet (because why in the world should he be expected to have one of those in advance?  I mean, he only drives around all day setting up internet connections all of which need a password) I got to talking about my project with said internet installation dude.  Well, that and why I wasn't interested in cheating on my (fully imaginary) stateside boyfriend with him.  But I found stories more interesting.

I told him the story of Rumplestiltskin.  People.  Have you listened to that story lately?  Or told it?  It is damn weird.  We are a strange, strange society that we tell our children these things.  In return, he told me a story about jackal and lion.  And so, I present to you my very first (fully non-usable for my project) Swazi folktale:

So.  This story is about jackal and lion.  Jackal is a big white dog and lion is very scary but also very stupid.  Jackal and lion were talking, and lion was complaining that he was very, very hungry.  After going around for a bit, they spot some prey animals.  Lion knows that if they go right up to them they will run away, so he tells jackal to go up and pretend to be their friend so that they will stick around.  Jackal approaches the prey animals, lets say they're Steenboks.  He says that he and Lion want to come and talk to them, but that they shouldn't be afraid of Lion.  Lion is actually Jackal's servant.  The Steenbok are understandably skeptical of this.  Jackal says that to prove it, he will go and get Lion, and come back with Lion carrying him on his back, proving that Lion is Jackal's servant.  The Steenbok agree, and Jackal goes back to explain the deal to Lion.  Lion is less than excited about this idea, but he is still very hungry.  So Jackal climbs up onto Lion's back and they parade up to the group of Steenbok.  Then everybody laughs at Lion for making an idiot out of himself, and all the prey animals run away anyways.

Draw your own conclusions.

Drips

Walking through the Swazi Plaza, enjoying my caramel ice cream cone, I met a man who informed me that he was a travelling monk who had been wandering around the world for the last 14 years.  He asked me for directions to the nearest Game (a store similar to Target), sold me a new age book on the spirituality of yoga for 1 lilangeni (20 cents), and told me I had a spontaneous spirit.  ("spontaneous spirit" may or may not have translated as "low cut shirt").

I call that a successful Friday.

Note to self...

Swaziland has not quite discovered .pptx and .docx yet.  Plan for this in the future.

(Which means I wrote a blog entry, but the computer I am currently using is pretty darn sure that it does not exist.  Oh wait... Boom.  Google docs ftw):

 It is so strange to make this switch from a peace corps volunteer living in a village, walking to school and greeting all the old ladies every day – ok, being laughed at by all the old ladies every day, more accurately – to living in what is essentially the ex-pat dorm in the capital city, complaining that my shower has too much water pressure and gets too hot.        Yesterday I was sitting around and talking with some PCVs* and RPCVs.** (This place is actually lousy with RPCVs, I don’t know why.  I guess it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who can’t stay away.)  We were talking about how out of touch the foreigners and the ex-pats we would run into during our service could be.  The ones who work in the city and roll up briefly to clinics, schools, and orphanages for brief pre-announced site visits, and think they know exactly what’s going on.  In a white SUV, of course.   I remember writing my personal statement for grad school about something along those lines.  There is an image that sticks in my head from when I was travelling in Malawi.   A woman was begging in the road, she would go up to each car waiting at the stoplight and hold her hand out for change.  Some people gave her money and some people didn’t.  There was a white SUV in the line of traffic that belonged to some NGO or other – African Hope or some other generic name like that.  The driver saw the woman, and the woman saw the driver and I just kept watching both of them.  Finally, as the woman got to the white SUV the driver just…rolled the window up and looked away.  And I thought – that’s the problem.  The problem is looking away, or refusing to see in the first place.
      But I’m starting to think it’s not as cut and dried as it used to be in my head.  It becomes so easy to get disconnected here.  Even in a country that takes all of four hours to drive across, with barely a million people in it, it is so easy to feel like I really have no idea what’s going on outside of my capital city ex-pat bubble.  It’s not that I only hang out with Americans, I don’t.  I walk around the city every day, I talk with my research assistants from the University, and the ladies at the guest house, and random people that I meet in town or taking a kombi somewhere.  The thing is though, that’s all in Mbabane and Manzini, the two biggest cities in the country.  It would be like saying I knew anything about rural Nkomazi after living and talking to people in Pretoria for all of a month.  There is no connection there.  So I’m wondering – how do I make that connection?  How do I get out of this bubble? 
      Don’t get me wrong, I really like living in an apartment and sitting around with friends making pink and purple green tea cupcakes covered in sprinkles and watching Project Runway.  This beats spending the evening sitting in my hut in Steenbok and staring at the ceiling by a few million miles.  But I also miss sitting on my stoop (/cinder block) in Steenbok and waving at people at sunset, and being laughed at by old ladies on my way to school in the morning.  I don’t think I have an easy answer or summary to the way I feel about what I’m doing now.  I like it.  I know how important it is for me to have a social network of some sort, and so I like the place where I’m staying.  I love the feeling of independence that comes with living and working in Africa again, and so I like having random conversations with people on the bus or the ladies at the guest house.  I’m so excited for when I finally get ethical approval (next week?) and can begin interviewing people in the rural areas in earnest about something that I find completely fascinating.  But this disconnect…this gap between what is really happening and my experience of a place is harder to negotiate than I would have thought.  

*Peace Corps Volunteers
**Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.  Even if they refuse to remain returned.