From the mountains to the mangroves

First thing first: Bush Fire. I don't know what I'd expected, I guess I hadn't thought too much about what I'd find down in Swaziland expect that I wanted to add another country to my list.

(Country list explanation: a friend / former colleague had had a big map of the world in his office covered with colored pushpins, explaining that a person must always keep track of where he/ she's traveled in the world because as you grow older and your list grows longer memories can get hazy. His rule of thumb was that you could only count places you've slept over in (and layovers & cruises don't count!) I keep a running list in my head for the day when I'll finally settle down and purchase my own map of the world. My current list: the USA, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Mozambique, and now Swaziland!)

Swaziland was GORGEOUS! Absolutely breathtaking. The first things I noticed upon arrival:

• there was no garbage on the streets! This fact in itself blew my mind....
• there were flowers everywhere, even in the cities
• the buildings weren't falling apart in disrepair, with paint chipping off and coal smoke stains crawling up the sides
• and, wonder of all wonders: there were occupancy limits to the public transportation!!!!! In several countries in Africa they use these 15-person vans for public transportation, however in Mozambique we cram 19 – 25 people in them (not including the babies, chickens, bundles of coconuts, etc...) Oh sweet glory to sit in a bus and be able to move my legs!!!

Swaziland is a very beautiful country being situated up in the mountains with quaint little villages in the valleys and wide open agricultural fields speckled throughout. The music festival venue was situated high in the mountains so that when you turned your gaze from the stage you'd see fields upon fields rolling out up and down the mountain-sides. The festival itself was quite impressive as well: extremely well organized, great food, an array of unique arts and crafts to appreciate and purchase, and an impressive line-up of musicians and performers from all corners of the globe. It was also a treat to meet and chat with the people who attended the festival; like myself many people there were from foreign countries traveling and/or working in the southern horn of Africa. I spent countless hours exchanging stories and travel tips with my fellow globe-trotters :)

I rushed home on Monday, waking up at 5am to pack up the tent and not stepping into my house until 23hours (!!) But the travel-packed day was worth it because by 8am the next morning I was out the door running to meetings and activities. From sunrise to sunset all week I've been super busy and productive, and you know only too well how much of much a treat that is.

I made 2 blackboards this week (bought a big plywood board, sawed it in half with my trusty swiss army knife, and then made a chalkboard paint with paint, black dye, and this white powder I got from a peace corps supervisor during my travels last weekend.) One board I left in my association to use for our English Club meetings, and the other I brought over to my friend who has recently started her own pre-school business.

The English Club started this week, we're offering free classes 3 nights a week for 2 hour sessions. It's only been one week and I don't want to jinx anything but attendance has been high, participation strong, and we've all been having a great time laughing and working together. This group so far is on top of they're game and seem like they'll stick with it.

We had 2 REDES meetings this week, each about 2 hours long and with different groups (one day is girls 10-12 years old, the other girls 15-17 years old). The girls are very shy but my counterpart (the woman who started the pre-school) is great interacting with them and the two of us had a great dynamic feeding off the others' energy. By the end of each session we'd played ice-breaker games, gone around the room having each girl talk a little about themselves, and had a good discussion about our group's goals and activities.

My JUNTOS group this week has been on FIRE! We've met for at least an hour or two every day practicing on a theater piece they put together about youth drug and alcohol abuse. Another kid wrote a poem about HIV and a girl finally finished her first news article about sanitation in our town. I'm so proud of them :) We have a workshop in a town about 45min away this coming weekend so they're all pretty psyched about performing the theater piece there!

Not much to update for my primary projects. Tomorrow we have one of our monthly meetings with the all of the association's activists and supervisors so I'm going to work with the OVC activists and make up a more concrete plan of our intended activities, materials, and costs of the project we've been discussing. Meanwhile the president and some of the leadership in the organization has been working on starting a sewing project, to teach our clients how to sew and offer classes to the general public to raise venues. I personally haven't been pushing this project too much because it's not based out of community needs, and we're not taking advantage of the talents available in our current workforce... but on the other hand the association seems to be really heart-bent on the idea and I don't want to dampen their enthusiasm. We'll see how it pans out. On Tuesday we're all going out into the bush to harvest some mandioca that we planted there earlier in the season. Originally we were supposed to have planted the tubers in order to give to our OVCs for food security purposes but now the association has changed its mind and wants to sell the produce and use the funds to purchase notebooks and pens for the kids. Again, I'm not too thrilled about changing the plan at the last minute and expressed my hesitations, but, as always, my concerns were brushed aside. I conceded that I'd be on board with the new plan as long as the funds are ACTUALLY used to buy school materials for the kids and not thrown into the coffers to use for “other” purposes.... I'll be keeping an eye on where that money goes.

On the personal front I started running again this week (woo hoo!) On Tuesday after English Club I went out with the Japanese volunteer in town and a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer who was crashing with me on his way traveling back up to his site. While drinking a beer, snacking on cacana (ground peanuts, mandioca, coconut and sugar mixed together), and grabbing a late dinner of rice, salad and curry we chatted about our respective upcoming travels this year. My Japanese friend mentioned a marathon coming up in September in Cape Town, and half joking proposed that we should go do it. I jumped at the idea, did some research on it the next evening after work, and now have been pushing him to sign up with me. No definite affirmative or negative yet, but I've been looking for motivation to get back in shape for awhile now so just having a prospective race has been enough to get me out of bed at 5:30 these past few days for 45-60 min jogs. Every time I re-start running I'm always amazed at how beautiful the world is in those early morning hours; I watch the sun rise up through the mists over the mangroves in the river where the women wash their clothes and the children bathe, running through the sand footpaths through forests of coconut, papaya, avocado, lemon, orange and mango trees (the mango trees are beginning to blossom again!) Children in school uniforms try to keep up with me running in fits of giggles for a few minutes at a time, men and women old and young call out good morning, sometimes I even hear people yell out my name which always makes me smile. Already I've had a few people approach me and ask to run with me, this morning I was supposed to run with one of the guards in the town prison but he overslept and only came out in his running sweats when I was already on my way home. The doctor in town has also asked to run with me, a cook in the official administrative kitchens, and one of the kids in my JUNTOS group. Hopefully this running frenzy doesn't fizzle away like all the other times! I've also been talking up doing some work-out videos with my neighbors, activists and JUNTOS kids. I have a fellow Peace Corps friend who does Insanity work-out videos with her OVCs and activists and I'd love to copy her!

Okay, this update is sufficiently long and tedious enough, if you've read this far you deserve a congratulatory pat on the back! (By the way, is this boring to people? Is there anything else in particular you'd prefer to read about besides my day-to-day??)

Big hugs to my far-away friends, family, former colleagues, old college and grad-school classmates, workout buddies, passing acquaintances, and curious strangers!

tia emilia