I am spending today cleaning, editing down overly long
reports, and baking avocado bread. The
avocado bread is because I have an excess of avocados that are starting to go
squishy on me. So does everybody else in
a 50km radius. People gift them to one another
in a sort of avocado white elephant roulette, restaurants put them on
everything they can think of, and I bake up every avocado bread and cupcake
recipe I can think of in the hopes that at least that will keep a little longer
if I put it in the freezer.
Confounding our avocado management issues are the huge storms that
have blown across Swaziland in the last week.
Last Saturday the whole northern part of the country was slammed with
hail the size of grapes and golf balls.
(Keep in mind that “the whole northern part of the country” is
equivalent to about the size of two US counties, but still). Some friends and I got caught in in it driving back from Kruger. At first it was just a very strong rainstorm
– the type of squall where you consider pulling over for the 10 minutes it will
take for the worst to pass over.
The roads here are narrow, and full of potholes in the rainy season and
cows in all seasons. Other cars and
kombis are not always as road worthy as they could be, and in bad driving conditions
it is usually just better to wait until things improve. And then we heard “Whack! Whack! Whack!” and realized…wait, is that
hail? We pulled over, got very lucky,
and saw a gas station with just enough cover under an overhang for us. We sat there for the better part of 20
minutes and listened to the hail slam my car. We watched other cars pull in to
try and get some shelter, including a bakkie full of people cowering under a
tarp, and we watched the hail shred the farms and fields of mealies around
us. When it finally slowed and we pulled
out, the sky was so dark and the fields were covered in so much hail that at
first I took it for fog. The road was
full of power poles, downed electricity lines, and people’s roofs, and every
dip in the road was so flooded and full of mud and debris that I now no longer
think it's necessary to tease myself for buying an SUV. I’m extraordinarily grateful I did.
People all over the country have been losing power on and
off as more storms come through every couple of days – though none as bad as
that first one, fortunately. Here in my
swanky neighborhood we haven’t gone without power for more than a few hours at
a stretch, though we didn’t have running water for about 24 hours.
All the last lingering avocados have been knocked from the
trees, and the gifting and swapping has ben extra intense lately while
everybody tries to figure out what to do with them all.
And here’s the thing: Recently, a woman whom I greatly
respect accused me of “playing at being poor.”
Well, not me specifically, but American vegetarians in general. Why, she wanted to know, would people from the
wealthiest country in the world eschew the food that many people here aspire to
eat on paydays and Sundays, and have to do without the rest of the month? A standard question on food security
questionnaires out here is “how many times a month do you manage to eat
meat?” And I refuse to eat it because... carbon footprint.
The woman who said this was laughing at me, not condemning
me (I think), but the phrase stuck with me.
Yes, I was scared to be driving in that hailstorm, but I was coming back
from a weekend being a tourist in Kruger, looking at leopards and eating a half
kilo of prawns for $12 (Hush. I eat fish).
I was scared, but my car was safe to drive (safe, mom, safe!) and the
worst property damage I risked were some dents to the roof that I can’t see
anyways unless I hop up and down. Sure
the power has been on and off, but I deal with that by making sure to charge my
computer battery at work and going out to lunch. When I’m worried about the water, I go buy 10
liters of bottled water. For me, the
consequence of one of the worst storms in a decade is that I need to spend my
weekend baking. Yesterday, I went to the
gym on a Saturday when usually I wouldn’t because I couldn’t take a shower at
home. These are my third world
problems. I have not lost my roof, I have not lost an
entire season’s plantings. I will not
get sick because the water is bad.
I do feel like I am playing at being poor. I skip in and out of the consequences of
living here, and for the most part they can’t hurt me. I respect them, but I am buffered. I do my research, I ask people for their
stories, and then I take them home, take them apart, and reconstruct them into
science. I play at being poor. I ask other people for their poverty, I ask
for their worst moments so that I can briefly dip a toe in and walk away. I don’t feel bad about that. I think it’s important. I think it can be done in a way that honors
and highlights the voices of people who aren’t always heard. But I cannot shake the fact that the
difference between them and me is that I am…playing. I drive through the ruined fields in my SUV,
and I am anxious but I have options and I am safe. I bake avocado bread and don’t eat meat, and
I try really, really, really hard to do good science because other people are
not playing.
