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.
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