Becalmed & Invaded

   The schools don't know what to do with us, so we still don't have slots for teaching. Makes us crazy.

   The “wealthier” Railway Primary School is now having classes, but the 6^th grade classroom teacher is still out writing her exams for a Masters, she is the senior teacher, and the other teachers will not agree to a schedule for us until she comes back and blesses it. And no progress opening their library.

    The “poorer” school is still pleading with the Ministry of Education for permission to hire the contract teachers, and has no schedule, it seems, until that happens. The principal was in Mbabane, the capital, yesterday trying to make that happen. They have much bigger problems than us, and are not addressing our schedule till they get this figured out. I get the sense this is pretty typical at the beginning of first term.

Its really hard to change the world as much as we'd like when we can't get regular time with our students.

    Swazis value agreement and consensus, and will tend to tell you what they think you want to hear, rarely disagreeing or giving bad news directly. If they wanted us to go away, they'd waste our time this way, never having an answer for us, and just ignoring us. But we think these issues are genuine, and we try not to take it personally. We sense other PCVs are encountering some of the same frustrations at this point, except for the young woman writing in the January SoJo I mentioned in the last post, January 27, who is probably being asked to be in at least 2 places at once all day!

    I'm assisting with a Senior Literature Class at the High School wresting with some Shakespeare Sonnets (“Shall I compare the to a summer day?” and “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment . . .”) and enjoying what I've been able to do of that, with some help from a friend of our son's wife's mother who really knows poetry, and we're helping a debate team with a presentation Saturday at the local government center on the harm from stigmatizing HIV, but we are not using our time as productively as we'd like. Maybe its a metaphor for the problems of “developing” countries. When we were in the US we talked with our son, a professor of development economics at Boston College, about current theories of what promotes and impedes development, and he assigned me some reading, and I sure see here the obstacles created by unreliable institutions, such as these schools wasting the first 2 weeks of the term. Not sure we're going to change that too much while we're here.

   We got back from (an unsuccessful visit to) one school around 10 yesterday morning with a load of heavy groceries (cans, produce, liquid no fat milk (the powdered milk is full cream and heavily processed)) we'd carried 1 ¼ miles and found animal poop on a table inside our hut and in the middle of the floor, things spilled off the table, and a mosquito net screen on the kitchen window loosened from its velcro fastening. A bird? Rodent? Snake? We searched and found no sign of the intruder, and cleaned up. The entry point did not appear to have been used as an exit – the netting was hanging inwards.

   When we got home late in the afternoon from working with the debate team at the High School I heard a stirring in Katherine's cloth US$35 prefab wardrobe, a sort many of us purchased to create some quick cheap shelf and hanging space. She swears she always leaves it zipped up, except not that one morning, but she'd then zipped it before leaving later in the day after we'd cleaned up from the intruder. Now hearing the intruder in her wardrobe, we armed ourselves with dustpans – seemed pretty effective against a rat, black mamba (kind of an unpleasant southern African snake), or other intruder,don't you think? – carried the wardrobe outside, slowly unzipped it . . . and a chicken darted out. I chased it all over the barn/court yard bravely trying to hit it with my dustpan, but it had no trouble keeping away from me. On Katherine's jeans folded at the bottom of the wardrobe we found a fresh egg! We gave it to the family. (This is Katherine and there never was a funnier sight than watching Mark chasing the chicken around the homestead waving a dustpan yelling "I'm going to kill you."  I was very relieved that the intruder was a chicken and not a snake, and that we saw it leave before we went to bed. I don't like the thought of of having uninvited guests in our hut!) (This is Mark: after Wyatt Earp had finished up in the OK Coral, I'm pretty sure some of the folks in Tombstone came out of their cellars and volunteered that they would have been happy to help, if he'd only asked.)

No pictures till I get the battery on my camera straightened out; our electricity switches on and off and surges, we believe, and we suspect that could be tough on a battery being recharged. We carefully unplug everything (except the fridge) during the frequent electrical storms, and never go to sleep or leave the hut with anything charging.

    The camera is a major concern, because in a week we go to Kruger National Park, north of Swaziland, in South Africa, for the weekend. Back in September we were invitedalong by the people who own the B&B 20 km away that we like – the husband is a bird enthusiast, and eye surgeon at the local hospital, and they like PCVs. It's principally a birding expedition, and my camera doesn't do birds well, but the place we're staying (Satara Camp) is one of the best places to see lions, elephants, water buffalo, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles and even leopards, as well as lots of cool birds. Being camera-less in Kruger would be, in a phrase I first encountered describing the plight of the non-voting District of Columbia “Representative” to Congress, like being a eunuch at an orgy.

    I'm practicing patience, going with the flow. Not my strong suit. The Swazis would ask God to provide and trust to Him. Not sure my camera should take priority over too many other pleas appearing on His list from around here.