Vignettes

We had to go to the commercial town Friday to pin down arrangements for a vacation in South Africa (St. Lucia and some other nature preserves in South Africa, south of here) over the Easter break, and we arranged to meet the Sisi and Make from our training host family for lunch. Katherine wore pants, and as she left the High School after delivering our daily Word of the Day one of the teachers said she “Looked like a boy.” Her haircut is short. Our training host Sisi (literally “sister” but generally a young woman) had had her hair all freshly braided and she'd done the top just that morning in a kind of poof. She wore the bright green silky cocktail dress she'd worn to her sister's wedding in December. Our Make (“mom”; “k” is pronounced like a hard english “g” as in “got”, so close to “Maggie”) wore for the first time I think a dress and matching head wrap and blouse she'd sewn herself. They both looked great. Our relationship is very important to them, so much so that we wish we could do more to respond to them. Their community is not easy for us to get back to. Make is busy making the vestments for her Good Friday services; Good Friday seems to loom larger than Easter here.

When we sit at the kitchen table during daylight hours Katherine likes to watch the little lizards or salamanders or newts, or whatever they are, as they hide and try to catch flies. Katherine is always cheering for the reptiles, dark, unmarked (as far as I can see – never caught one) little fellows no longer than 3” long – and she's even been known to try to herd a fly towards a lizard waiting in the shadow of the window sash. Ever try to herd a fly? It's hard – you have to really hate flies. She does.

On a hot afternoon when the flies inside our hut get really annoying we keep track of kills. Once I had 7 straight – 7 swats with the fly-swatter, 7 little carcasses confirmed belly-up on the kitchen table. That was really unusual; we are typically lucky to bat 500; I think as the summer wanes the flies are getting smarter - natural selection?

As we hear from our friends that spring is coming, haltingly, to Denver, so too the seasons here are changing. Mornings are chill - maybe 55 degrees F, our outdoor shower at the end of the afternoon is . . . bracing. Fewer days are oppressively lot. Rains are less frequent, less violent, and simply less. We're trying to save the water from the roof we collect in barrels in the shower area for our showers, because it's so convenient there, so we use water from the tap for drinking and washing dishes. The roof water tastes better and has less silt in it than the water from the pump, which has traveled many miles through leaky pipes. We boil all of the water we drink, and then run it through a sanitizing filtration system.

 You will no doubt be a little relieved to learn that high schools are pretty much the same the world over. At least, over the two parts of the world with which this writer has any recent familiarity. And a good place to observe this is at a fall football game between nearby schools.

The morning of The Big Game the assistant principal makes a speech at assembly about school spirit and warning about fighting and throwing rocks. And drinking alcohol at the game; we were told by the teachers that problem really only arises from the school's alumni/alumnae. That kind of passing the blame occurs Stateside too, I think I recall.

During the morning of the game there seems to be less attention to studies than usual. At the game, the teenage girls cheer and dance. The boys pretend to ignore them. But I thought I noticed during the game that there was more hot-dogging by the players along the side-line in front of our school's stands - “no need to pass, I'll just dribble it through these three defenders.” And maybe more heroic injuries there, too. And yellow cards. It's as if the excited 17 year old girls created a separate penalty area on the field directly in front of the stands.

Those of us from Denver were pleased to hear the Swazi version of our Mile High Stadium's Rocky Mountain Thunder – drumming with around 160,000 feet on the metal deck of the stadium. Turns out that if you beat your fists or nearly anything else against the corrugated metal covering of the stadium, you get about the same deafening effect. That top row of the stadium here, in fact, had the same ambiance as the rowdies in the Denver South Stands. And the teachers trying to keep order had about the same effect as all those Denver police, who were not going to get punitive with loyal fans.

There were some differences:

• When the ball soared over the cinder-block walls at the end of the field into the acacia thicket, it came back more slowly. We are told the ½ life of an inflatable soccer ball here is measured in weeks.
• The singing here is much better than I remember at home. Of course, they practice the solo call and choral  repeat style every morning at assembly. I noticed no religious references in the tunes at the ball game. And I think the dance moves in the crowded stands here looked better than what I've seen on fall Friday afternoons in the States.
• The vuvuzelas they blow in your ear here have, blessedly, been so far left outside American stadiums as far as I know. How did we get so lucky? It's been several days since the game; the ringing in my ears seems to be diminishing. Say what? Are you speaking to me?
• I think our students applauded as Katherine and I entered the stands. Really? Now, it's been a while, but I don't recall applause when I was growing up for any elderly foreign teachers with odd accents and weird ideas, lecturing us obsessively about sex.
  So, yeah, pretty much the same. But there's some distinctive local flavor.
• Here they are directly after a score.

Our homestead has become quieter. The domestic worker who had pretty good English and so was our principal means of communicating with the family has abruptly quit, taking her 2-year-old. She felt she was over-worked and unappreciated. But the biggest change has been that a snake killed our rooster, which makes our nights much, much quieter. I've never been so grateful to a snake.

We usually do a wash each weekend. Here Katherine is at the cement tub among the banana trees at 7:30 Sunday morning.

Sunday we rode our bikes to the site where another volunteer lives and had lunch with her. Her school is a whole lot better funded than ours. The single volunteers find weekends long, lonely and boring unless they plan something, which they frequently do. Serving as a couple is a whole lot easier, for many reasons. Many.