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.
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