Are You Local?

"So are you local, or SA? Mozambique?"

I started babbling mid-question because I knew what the answer would be, and I didn't really want to hear it.

"Local." Thoba said it with a long-suffering grin. He twisted off the bottlecap on a Foundry Cider and slid it across the bar. "But my dream is to go to the States. Get a good job, make some money —" another grin, this time more Oceans Eleven " — change it into rand. I come back and I'll be driving a BMW."

Thoba is a bigger man than most Swazis I've met in the town of Mbabane. He dresses in striped sweaters when he tends bar. His bar, though, is too small to hold his bulk most nights: when I met him, he'd barely handed out beers before he invited a Finnish friend and I to a game of pool. He's showed me the town the last two nights I've been here. We've talked trash, rugby, travel, politics, and women*. But his personal story, his dream for the future, is something we both steered away from after that first conversation. It makes him uncomfortable, I think, because his dream is not dissimilar from my life. Or maybe it's me: it makes me uncomfortable because I've heard that dream from almost everyone I've talked to. If I had a rand for everyone who's told me they'll go to America someday, I'd quit school, move to SA and bribe Oxford for an honorary diploma to hang in my new Dutch mansion.

The conversation, at its most direct, runs something like this:

"Uhlala eStates? When are you going back?"
"Going back? Sometime in May, I guess."
"You should take me with you."

This is what people say word-for-word, often as not. All the most enterprising people I've met in Africa just want to get out.

It's depressing, mostly. I don't know how to react to it. What do you tell someone? Words of encouragement are hard to muster, and it's not something you can brush off. They know full well how great the place is just from seeing you. Some people bring up their country's problems, as if to make the point that life is hard there too. What American problems are you going to talk about, though? Obesity? Affirmative action?

When I'm sitting outside an ancestor house with malnourished village kids while my boss tells their sick grandmother how to take her tuberculosis tablets, I know that I'm not the one with problems.

Before I Leave The Township

.. I've got to show you all some photos of the place. Here are some random shots of characters around the Berg. I leave tomorrow (!) and I'm trying to get good shots of everyone before I go.

Miya, Sofi's daughter, bouncing around to Paul Simon on the stereo.

Sofi's son! Lungelo. I like this one, don't know why.

Lungelo and Miya, along with a pair of visiting kids.

My sweet, sweet truck.

The toolshed outside where I work when I need electricity.

Miya again, wandering around. This was at a creche (preschool) we visited
while it was being blessed; it just opened the middle of the
township, and people have high hopes for the neighborhood now.

Opening day, same creche.

Pabel, left. Sofi (my boss), right. These are our
biggest-hearted home-based carers in the Berg.

More photos coming soon! Now I have to jump on a ride back to my farewell barbecue. It's gonna be sweet.

What's Worse Than Earwigs?

Lately I've gotten into the habit of checking under toilet seats for spiders or other creepy crawlies. I haven't had any bad experiences, exactly. Except one.

At Cosmos Farm, our toilets are built like outhouses, except they're positioned above a six-foot pit. They're never emptied, either, so most of us to do our minor business behind a bush somewhere. Otherwise the stench gets too unbearable to go near them, let alone sit for twenty minutes.

Not long ago, the whole Berg sweated in a weeks-long hot spell. It was around early March, right at the start of autumn. The mosquitos got so bad at night I would barely wait until dinner before diving under my bed's bug net.

In the middle of one night I rolled out of bed and went to use the longdrop. I flipped up the lid in the dark; I didn't feel like wasting power for a flashlight, but the night by now was tar. Thinking I'd avoid a few bites while I sat, I shot some mosquito spray into the hole under the seat.

The buzz from that hole was so loud I thought it was in my ears. And then it was: a cloud of flies erupted from under the seat.

I didn't use that toilet for a week or so. I went out a lot to cafés with nice plumbing.

Anthropologists Dream Exotic

It's been a while. It's hard to pack everything I've been doing into a short post. Most of it's been networking anyway. There are a lot of people up here with really cool ideas for improving the communities. One woman I know is finishing up her Hydrology degree, and she wants to start a fish farm that recycles its water into a commercial garden. Another wants to start a farming program that teaches villagers to farm with organic seed, so they don't have to buy other people's seed every year.

Lynn said when she first came to my class to pitch Africa to us 76 students, "more than anything, Africa is really like the Wild West." I heard that and knew where I wanted to travel. And — this surprises me more than anything — she was right. It's just like the Wild West. Roads are wide and dusty, weapons are cheap, the law's arm is long enough to scratch his armpit. And an entrepreneur can carve out a paradise for himself, or for lots of other people.

Anyway. In real news: winter's pretty much here, which means sun and chilliness. I started working on my paper and I like how it's shaping up. I helped fixed my house's solar panels last week with this guy:

Introducing Hlo, a nephew of Sofi and the only fellow teenager in the Ntshalintshali household. He's going to college in Pietermaritzberg for a degree in pro chefery. For the last couple weeks he's been away at school, but the Easter holiday lasts almost a month here, so in a couple days he'll be back pretty much to stay, as far as my sense of time is concerned. It's been a while since I seriously examined what I'll be doing next month.

What else have I been doing? Well, yesterday I drove a health worker to Pietermaritzberg to pick up a deaf kid for the holidays. On the way back, over a mid-trip dinner of burgers and shakes (their McDonald's here is called "Wimpy's") I mentioned that I'd like to find time soon to talk to a Sangoma — the Zulu name for a local shaman-healer. For a caste who supposedly serve the Zulu community, it's disconcerting how much everyone fears them; they have a reputation for making people who don't like them die or disappear, and extracting incredible payments from people who want their services.

I figure not everyone gets to wander around a country where shamanism is still practiced. In fact, it's an anthropologist's wet dream. Why not take the opportunity to meet one?

Well, that comment was a mistake. That health worker I was driving halfway to the Indian Ocean turned out to be born-again. For almost forty minutes she warned me to stay away, or at least please be very careful around them, because of course you should never fear them because I can tell Jesus Christ is with you, but if you aren't quite clever one of the dead spirits in a Sangoma's house might attach itself to you.

She never told me what happens if I wind up with a spirit following me around, but I'd imagine she didn't look on it as pleasant. And here I was just planning to find a medicine man who was out to make a buck.

He's Such an Englishman Sofi's Daughter Called Him "Daddy" and He Blushed

Here at Cosmos Farm my bosses hold a Bible Study every Friday. I'm not always comfortable sitting in — most of the members are very conservative. And I haven't considered my own spirituality since I moved away for college; appreciating what some call Creation is hard enough when you're running on deadline after deadline, gulping coffee like a fish (or burning through half a pack a day, like some of my friends). But I keep joining in around the edges. It's the only time during the week the whole white community gets together here. They're a very diverse group: some are quiet seekers of God, some are friendly missionaries working in local schools, some are loud, fire-and-brimstone evangelists.

But one guy in particular stood out when I met him. Andy is from England, and like me, he's working on a thesis for school here. In his case he's working on his PhD. Also like me, he's been trying out and scrapping subjects for his academic Magnum Opus.

Right before I met him, I settled on a subject for my school project that turned out similar to his. That's right! I finally know for sure what I have to do to graduate this year. Here's a sketchy version of the proposal:

Topic: the Zulu perspective of the AIDS pandemic ravaging their community.

Framing Questions:

- Why, after almost twenty years of AIDS education, have the numbers of infected spiked in this area of KwaZulu-Natal?

- The Zulu community of KwaZulu-Natal has responded to the AIDS epidemic with a remarkably fatalistic attitude. Is the atmosphere a reflection of the Zulus' situation with the disease, or does it also reflect pre-existing values in their culture?

- What obstacles face the AIDS patients of KwaZulu-Natal? Can they be surmounted without outside help?

- Are NGOs really helping AIDS patients get treatment and manage the stigma of their disease?


Living in what's called the AIDS capitol of the world, I'm well-placed for the job.

The research has been going well so far, except that I've done a terrible job documenting it. I have an Academic Blog where I keep readers up to date with the gritty details of my research. I'm working a lot of catch-up right now to finish the couple of entries I missed. (But by the time you read this, they'll be up. I update my academic blog every Sunday, so keep checking back if that interests you.)

Basically, that's all I know about my own subject. I've got a few leads -- people to discuss my project with who might point me toward something interesting.

Andy is the first of those leads. For his doctorate, he's designing a new kind of education program. It's supposed to be more effective at deterring the spread of AIDS. The program is called "Crossroads," and I don't know much about it except that it sprung out of a research paper on the Christian Church's AIDS education. Like a true Greener, as soon as I heard the word "Church" I caught a whiff of a possible train wreck, especially since it's also supposed to "teach Zulus modern values and responsibility." But it should be interesting. And Andy is a quietly married Englishman. He seems too gentle to be wrapped up in weird, sexually frustrated Jesus Camp doctrine.

I'm working on getting to sit in on a Crossroads lesson, and I'll do a full write-up of it once I get myself in there. For three weeks now I've been reading about AIDS and the Zulus, and I've been working with AIDS patients. I've seen enough sick people for a crack team of medical anthropologists.

Crossroads is definitely my next step. Maybe it'll turn out to be exactly what this place needs. I can hope so, anyway.

News from the Township

I hate to post so sporadically — it bumps the pretty photos down. If you haven't seen the second batch of Durban pictures (or the ones of my house-sitting), check 'em out below!

I wrote this letter to a friend about driving in Durban:

"Oh, and I took to left-side driving like a catfish to cooking oil -- it's been a delicious time. It took me half an hour to adjust, and I'm good at navigating the cities without getting nervous -- people here drive like bipolar thespians on the run from body image disorders. The police do nothing unless they think you'll give them money. Right-of-way in this country is legally whichever car is bigger. It's SO MUCH FUN."

Bad news from work the other day. One of our people is dead. Sofi and I called an ambulance for the woman as soon as we found her lying in her bed. It was my first day of work, February 18th. She had all the symptoms of menengitis. I didn't know much about it at the time, just that Sofi had left a note for the meds asking for a Lumberg Puncture to test.

By the way — ever heard of a Lumberg Puncture? If you've ever watched House, probably. All I knew about it was the massive needle they stick into people's spinal columns to drain fluid. But as it turns out, the fluid they take tests for many things (and Lupis is only one disease among 'em). One of them is menengitis. It's supposed to take half an hour to test the fluid once it's out of the spine.

Well, in the US it takes half an hour. This is South Africa; and the local hospital she was taken to is among the worst. It took them two tests and nine days to get any results, and then the nurses tending her didn't bother to check them. They put her on anti-retrovirals (for her late-stage AIDS), which took two days of training before they could treat her. The first day of training went fine; the second, they complained that she was "too sick to train" and sent her back to her bed. So after ten days, she died in hospital of menengitis and AIDS. We just found out Monday.

The news hit Sofi hard. She knew the woman; I didn't. I'd barely seen her. But Sofi railed for hours. In the States, negligence like this would be impossible, but here they probably won't even investigate it.

That doesn't, of course, mean we're going to try. Sofi and I are writing a case study now; we'll send it to the government, and if they don't do something promptly, we've been talking about sending it to the newspapers.

But it's hard to write about; we're still too much in shock to remember dates and facts. It's really too twisted.

Updatings

I've got updates! First of all, I am alive. I consider that important. Also, nothing has threatened my life lately. Although I did smash my toe under a couple of loose windowpanes. But nothing serious, I'll live!

I am realizing my true lack of cooking practice. Everything here is made with corn, beans and potatoes. But I am an Italian-style culinary dabbler. I must adapt quickly! Quick: everyone post back with recipes for mashed potatoes (and pancakes too, I've been drawing a blank on that recipe). You'll be my hero.

Now the real news: a couple of days ago, Sofi and I gunned the car back to the farm at 130K. We'd gotten a call that there was a man who had wandered up there and was harrassing the nanny and the kids, and Sofi was freaked. Apparently the nanny, Dudu, was in tears; he'd left, but she wasn't sure whether he was hiding nearby.

For the record, this is no fortress we live in. It looks like this:

We have spotty running water, solar electricity, no bars on the windows, and certainly no family gun. I even lost my pocket knife. So I don't know what we were planning to do.

Anyway, we jumped out of the car and the kids ran up to us, totally calm and grinning from ear to ear that we'd come home so early. Dudu was washing clothes in a basin. Sofi set about trying to figure out what had happened. Dudu was stony.

What happened was this, as near as we can figure: a man showed up and started asking questions about who owned the farm and when they'd be back. Supposedly he didn't threaten or touch anyone, or do anything really terrible at all. He could have just been looking for Sofi, wanting a ride to the hospital. But something set Dudu off; we just don't know what.

But now Heather is freaked out about staying here. The other morning, when I walked into the kitchen, she started talking about moving out. "I want to find alternate housing," she started. "I know you won't understand, because you're a guy."

It looks like she's going through with it, too. Right now she's completely moved out and she's staying with a couple from the local Bible study group. Have to admit I don't really like it; we've already had trouble since we only have one car between the two of us. Living across town from each other won't help get things done.

Her rational is that she's not as big a risk-taker than we are. But to me, it doesn't make much difference where you live around here: it's friends that take care of you, and they do it much better than a house.