Third World Problems

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.