First of all, I have a joke to share. It begins as follows:

“So, a lawyer, a missionary, and a grad student spend the night in an airport coffee shop…”

I leave the punch line to your own ingenuity and/or imagination.

Second of all, I have recently gained some key insights into the day to day functioning of the OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg. I will now share that information with you in more or less chronological order of importance:

1. There are two stores that sell wine by the bottle, however the cheaper place stops selling at 8pm, so if you find yourself in need of 3 people’s worth of cheap red wine and coke some evening…plan ahead.

2. Nobody cares if you crack open your very own bottle of wine in the middle of the food court. If you ask nicely, you can even get a nearby bartender to lend you a corkscrew.

3. The people at the food court in charge of the comfortable orange chairs will start trying to take them away from you around 11pm or so. However, whoever it is that is in charge of the less comfortable but still perfectly serviceable blue picnic tables could give a damn.

4. The people at Mugg and Bean will not only let you sleep on their booth benches, not only let you build a little table fort to as minimize exposure, and not only pour rum into pretty much anything you ask them to…they will also send some trainee to “the shop” (?) at 11:30 in order to organize you some banana toffee waffles at midnight.

5. I’m pretty sure the airport heater gets turned off at night.

6. Airport staffers enjoy doing whatever it is they do on a night shift while listening to a mix tape of what appears to be house music overlaying gospel overlaying …screaming babies?

7. The Mugg and Bean waiter will let you know when the boss is coming with a cheery “Kusile!” and “Good morning!” at 4:45am sharp.

…only 15 hours (or is it 39?) to go.

Right now, I'm sitting in my hotel room just across from the OR Tambo airport. I wasn't planning to spend the evening in a hotel room, but it turns out that sometimes flying standby has just as many drawbacks as perks. There's only one flight a day from Jo'burg to Atlanta. I'll try again tonight -- wish me luck.

There's something about the empty neutral space of a hotel room that I secretly like. They always feel like a transitional space to me. Liminal (I like that word). I like the way a faceless conglomerate tries to anticipate what an individual person would want. I like owning a flat screen TV and a whole fake-fancy studio apartment of my own for a night. I like the liminal ownership of the situation.

I could have made it on the first try had I left Saturday, but instead we had an amazing going away party that night. There was this moment, at the end of the evening, when one of our guests looked at another, and declared that they were going to stand together and advocate for themselves. That they would refuse to be ignored and would work together to make sure they were seen and heard. I have never witnessed history before, and I think Saturday night I did. Just there, in my living room. Over cupcakes I had spent the morning baking. I had goosebumps. That moment alone was worth 10,000 missed flights and 10,000 neutral hotel rooms. It was powerful.

Of course, I would also like getting on an airplane back to America tonight. My favorite part of travelling, every single time, is when the customs person in Atlanta flips through my passport, looks up, and says "welcome home." I like being welcomed home.

Last week, I took some time from my crucial schedule of life saving meetings and interminable office time spent under life sucking florescent lights to get an up close look at the HIV health systems in the country. Not on purpose, entirely, I didn't plan it, but a friend asked for a favor and I wanted to do something that felt tangible.

My friend had told me about a separate friend of hers who is very ill. This friend needed to get a refill on her ARVs, but the refill had to be done at a clinic that was far away, and the woman was too sick to get them herself. My friend had already filled the prescription once on her behalf, but had been told by the clinic staff that next time the actual patient would need to fill her own prescription. I offered to give the woman a lift to the clinic. For some reason I thought this would be no big deal. The friend stays in the town where I work, and the clinic is in the town where I live. I'd just give everybody a ride on my way out of town, right?

I don't know why I still think things work this way. I should know better by now.

Thursday afternoon my friend came and met me at my office. We went to the woman's home. She was extremely weak, it took three family members helped her get into my car. I would have been able to pull up closer, but somebody had parked their truck in the driveway leading up to the woman's house and was busy washing it one 2 liter soda bottle at a time, so I just had to stop my car in traffic, throw my hazards on, and really regret that I couldn't park any closer.

When we arrived at the clinic my friend and I helped the lady out of the car and into the waiting room. The clinic was well lit, well ventilated, and not too busy. There probably are some hellish visions of overcrowded, over stressed HIV hospital facilities out there, but this wasn't it. There were only a few people in line ahead of us. One woman was dropped off at the door, escorted in by a husband, and cut the whole line, but that was the most egregious part of the process. After about 20-30 minutes, our friend was taken in to see the nurse. My friend had asked me to stay and ask the nurse if her friend could be transferred to a clinic in Mbabane, much closer to where they stay. She felt that the nurses would be more likely to listen to me than to her or her friend. I agreed, because as distasteful as the fact is -- she was probably right.

We went inside, and the nurses looked at the woman's refill book and refilled her ARVs. When I asked if she could be transferred to the clinic that was much closer to the woman's house, the nurses explained that only doctors could transfer patients, and the doctor would not be in until the next day, so the woman should come back again then. I strongly considered pointing out all of the USAID signs all over the place and dropping a good old, "my tax dollars pay your bla bla bla" but while there's a time and place for vaguely jerk like American assertiveness, there's never a time for stupid. The nurse and I went back and forth for a few minutes. I was taking huge, grievous, gargantuan advantage of my accent and my skin color and my wealth, and we both knew it. But on the other hand...if all that privilege can be useful to somebody, shouldn't it? Or does taking advantage of those things somehow reinforce some...thing that is a big part of the problem with the system in the first place? I don't know. But my friend had asked me to do it, so I did.

It was very clear that the woman needed to see a doctor immediately, but getting to the clinic had already been a huge effort for her, going back there again on the next day just wasn't an option. I come from this perspective, and this place, where I think that if you just walk into a health care facility everything will be fine. Because thats how it was when I was a kid. When you're sick, you find somebody to make you better. Walk through the right door and somebody will fix you up. I'm not stupid, I know how untrue that is in Africa, and America, and pretty much everywhere else too, but some part of me in the back of my head just kept mumbling that now that she was here, and in front of not one but two nurses...shouldn't everything be ok? Couldn't they fix this somehow? And the rest of me thought, no...of course not. And what did I expect them to do about it anyways?

Finally, after a prolonged telephone conversation with the government doctor in the right clinic (during which the phrase "You get here at nine ish??!! I'm not waiting around for whenever nine-ish happens," might have occurred, and forever cemented the public health nurse's love for me) it was agreed that we would take the woman to the VCT clinic near her house immediately to see a doctor, that the visiting doctor (who was planning to show up the next day at nineish) would sign her over to the closer clinic in absentia the next day, and I would bring the file up there myself once he (presumably he) had done that. Complicated.

After we agreed on this, we brought the friend back to my car, and drove her back to the city. The VCT clinic where we were going is actually two separate buildings on the government hospital compound. One is for testing, and one is for ART patients. Imagine what this means if you are going to get your medication. Just by walking towards that door, the door where only HIV+ patients go in, you have to announce to everybody one of the most private, intimate facts about yourself. When you walk through that door, you tell everyone around you that there is a virus living inside you that the King just called a terrorist. And you have to do it to pick up the medication that helps you survive. Some people -- a lot of people -- aren't completely sure that that bargain is worthwhile to them.

We took the woman inside, and the first person we saw took one look at her and at the three of us it took to get her the 15 feet from the parking lot to the clinic, and directed her to the emergency room. This is literally a room for emergency patients with the word "sick" written on red construction paper and taped to the door with medical tape. Its just that, the room for emergency patients. I find something about this darkly funny. We were met by a very nice British (I think) doctor, and didn't have to wait terribly long before being seen by one doctor, and another one. While we sat and waited for the doctors to examine her, my friend told me about how she would go from house to house in their community, visiting people who were sick with HIV, encouraging others to test, and generally trying to offer all of the support she can. Not because anybody asks her to, certainly not because anybody pays her to, but just because she feels she needs to. I told her that I think God will bless her for that, and that if anybody deserves to go straight to heaven, it is her. I said it partially because I think it was something she needed to hear, and partially because that I meant it. I meant it in translation, if that makes sense, but I really meant it. She is one of those astounding, quiet people who will never win an award, never meet the president, never be celebrated by international news media or maybe even told thank you by more than the few people who think of it, but who keeps doing something phenomenal and selfless and important anyways. Because its right, and because...she wants to. What do you say in the face of that, besides, "God will bless you."

Finally, after around 45 minutes from the time we got there, our friend was wheeled out of the emergency room and admitted to the hospital.

We followed the attendant to the hospital, and were told to meet her in a particular ward, while my friend checked her in. The most visible item on window to the reception office is a sign in English and siSwati. The sign explains that corpses will only be released to family members who have fully payed their hospital and mortuary fees, and have the receipt to prove it.

We found our friend in a bed next to a window and spent some time talking with her until the ward nurse came over. The nurse was wearing a face mask and was extremely warm and cheerful. As we left, I smiled and told the nurse that this woman was my friend and extremely important to me, so could she please make sure to take extra good care of her? The nurse laughed and told me that she couldn't because that would be unfair -- she had to take extremely good care of everybody. Finally we agreed that she should take extra good care of everyone there so that our friend could get extra good care too. I knew exactly what I was doing, I was taking advantage of a crap system again. I was making a point of showing that I was behind this woman and that I cared, even if we only knew one another for the space of an afternoon. It kind of makes me feel a little bit...sick to know that this is a thing I would even try. At least in Swaziland I was taking advantage of wealth, and not race. Like exploiting class divisions is somehow better than exploiting race divisions. I don't know.

We left, and the the friend said goodbye. I keep meaning to go back and visit her, and I keep...not. Mostly, I think I don't want to go and be told that she's gone.

Nothing in the process was particularly egregious in terms of health care accessibility or services. Supplies were never too short, we never had to wait an inordinately long time, nobody was particularly rude. But I think at least some of the last two points had to do with the fact that I was there with these two women at every step of the process as a sort of silent (only once not so silent) advocate. All in all it was about 4.5 hours from the time we left the offices to the time we left the friend at the hospital. Getting all of those things done in just one day -- or any of them at all -- without access to private transportation would have been impossible.

Maria and I had a long conversation afterwards, about health and human rights, and social justice, and whats fair and whats right and why we're in this field in the first place. She pointed out that at no point was there a failure of human rights, and thats true. But justice? Is that story just? Is it right? We were not playing on a level field there. The deck was stacked. Insert other game metaphor here.

I think I was much better at making blog posts when I was a PCV than now when I'm actually working. (Sorry mom) Why is this? I think in Peace Corps I just inherently had better/funnier stories. I think also, now that I'm working-working, its a little bit less appropriate for me to (gently) poke fun at what I do every day, since most of that takes place in fairly legitimate offices. Plus, while my job is FANTASTIC, and I love just about every second of it, its really not a good one to discuss in a public forum. Feel free to email me in private if you're really that curious about what I do.

Oh, also, the blog stuffexpataidworkerslike.com does a WAY better job of summarizing my daily life than I ever could. So I leave a lot of it to them.

As of today, I have 29 days left in my favorite tiny mountain kingdom. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it will be nice to be back in the states. I miss my family and friends. At Erin and Roy's wedding I realized just how much I miss a lot of really wonderful people who I went to school with and how much I want to do a better job of staying in touch with them. I miss the variety of America, and some days I miss being invisible. But... (sorry again mom, there's a "but") I've been emailing back and forth with a friend of mine who did her own stint away from the US for a while. She said, "aren't you excited to move back to America for good?!" And I thought..."Wait? For good? Who said anything about for good? I'm moving back to America for now." I felt the reverberations of a distant, mini panic attack. I've lived in southern Africa on and off for over three years now. I've been a college graduate (an "adult" if you will) for six years. I'm just as good at being a grown-up here as I am at being a grown-up in America. Maybe better. I love what I do here. I love the variety and the absurdity and the slight-to-major challenge that comes with getting just about anything done here. I like it here.

Three vivid memories, or memories of phrases, stick with me from my very first week in Peace Corps, my first week in South Africa. I remember sitting on the bus leaving the Jo'burg airport, trying not to start crying hysterically, and thinking over and over, "I'm 10,000 miles from everyone I love and everyone who loves me." Over and over again. I couldn't get that sentence to leave my head. And then, we got to our first training site, and we spent a week listening to bull roarers and singing coming from an Ndebele initiation school in the hills behind us, and I wrote my parents a letter. I told them, "I'm falling in love with this place, and I never expected that to happen." Which is corny and kind of cliché, but was also true. And I remember sitting in my freezing rondavale, with the other PCVs who would really soon become the people whom I loved and the people who loved me. I re-read Stardust, the illustrated version, and I hit the part where Tristran Thorn gets ready to walk across the wall and into Faerie, and "he knew if he turned back now, nobody would think any less of him" and he went anyways. It was the perfect sentence in the perfect paragraph in the perfect time. About walking into the unknown but knowing it was right.

And here I am now, four years later. I'm still 10,000 miles away from so many people whom I love, but now I love being in this place too. I have people who I care about here, too. I love walking into the unknown every day.

I'm looking forward to new challenges in America, and being with so close to so many people who matter to me. But I also am already planning how to come back here again just as quick as I can. So in 29 short days, I'm coming back to America.

For now.

"I'd love the eggs benedict please. Oh -- and fruit! Do you have any fruit I could have on the side?"

"We have hashbrowns."

"Um...fruit?"

"Hashbrowns are potato."

"I think I'll just have the eggs benedict."

I've got my computer open... free wifi is running... the coffee doesn't suck...

This might be one of the top 10 best days ever.

This is happening.

And this.

But...I'm fine. I promise. I've also checked in with friends at the University, and they're okay too.

I plan to spend my evening eating margarita cupcakes and playing trivial pursuit in my (safe, safe) house. This is a fascinating historical moment to experience, however I don't think this blog is an appropriate place to explore that moment. If you happen to be interested, feel free to email me.

I'm back from Sabie now, and sitting in "my" office at the Ministry of Health. (The door is still labeled with nothing but STI[!] in big red letters, and I am still 12 and that still makes me laugh).

Yesterday I came back from Sabie via Steenbok, which is in absolutely no way the shortest possible route, but I wanted to stop in and say hello. When I got there, the family was away at the clinic, so I spent some time hanging out with a group of kids/youth/young adults who were on their way to a soccer match in Naas. About 35 of men and women were milling around the bus stop by the house, chatting one another up, and implying that they were all about to fit themselves into two pick-up trucks and then race down the pot hole littered road to town. I said there was no way they'd ever fit everybody. I was totally wrong. If you have never seen 35 more or less grown adults hop into the back of a couple of pick-up trucks and drive off to the next town, swerving around pot holes, blowing vuvuzelas, and cheering at every other car the see. Well. I recommend the site to you.

It was late-ish when I got into Steenbok, because I'd been coming down from Sabie that afternoon. Going to Steenbok added an extra 2.5 hours to my drive home, but I think it was worthwhile. One of the really nice things about working out here in Swaziland is the chance to see my host family again. When I left in 2008 I promised I'd try and come back, sure, but I don't think any of us believed that it would ever happen. I think we all assumed that our intersection would be more of a brief and singular one than something we'd have the chance to take up again. I feel genuinely lucky that I have a home I can go and visit in SA. No matter how awkward those home visits still are, or how out of the way that home is. Lucky, lucky, lucky me to have a place that had such a profound impact on my life only a two podcast drive away.

You all: $640. The fifth highest amount raised for the whole event!

Me (/my butt): Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

Wow. Thank you thank you to those of you who have raises over $500 for KLM so far! It is an amazing amount of money that really is going to make a huge difference to a kid in Mpumalanga. For those of you who are still considering donating, and may have a few dollars to spare (an unexpected tax return or other recent lucky break perhaps?), the race isn't until the 26th so there is still plenty of time to share! Five dollars is an awesome contribution -- $10 is amazing. Or might I suggest...$13.10?

Photographic update with me looking sweaty as hell to follow on Monday morning.

Last month we went to one of the royal kraals for the beginning of marula season. Translation: we hung out in one of the king's palaces/cattle pens while all the gogos rolled up with the first of the season's marula beer. Marula is the stuff amarula is made out of. Marula beer does not taste like amarula. People come from all over the country in their traditional get up and hang out in a cattle pen drinking home brew beer out of old oil canisters until the king shows up, commands them to sing and dance, and then tells them to get drunk.

It is strangely reminiscent of a renaissance faire.

Casey was the star of the show. Everybody wanted to hand him drinks out of old oil drums. We were commanded to take this photo.

Eventually, the gogos all paraded from the palace to the show ground. We were also commanded to take pictures of that. So we did.

Beer and grilled meat in a crowded dirt lot -- somehow this felt like a lot of my college experience.

After that weekend, we decided that we needed to spend more of our weekends having fun. So we went to Kosi Bay, which is a world heritage site on the Indian Ocean, just a teensy bit south of the Mozambique border. It was about 6 hours from Mbabane, and at a certain point the road stops being paved and starts being...kind of just a lot of potholes. Punctuated by cows. But then its fine, because it turns into sand.

But the sand turns into a view that looks like this. Kosi Bay is a series of lakes leading up to an ocean. Those little fences in the water are fish traps. The tide comes in, the fish get trapped, and then people can just go and scoop them up. Its genius. And it looks really awesome.

So beautiful. This is one of the lakes with beautiful green mountain and neat fishing traps.

It takes a 45 minute drive in a 4x4 to get to the beach proper. My little car was not going to do that, but we had the chance to bump on down there in an old school land rover and hung out for hours. We had to wade through a series of tide pools holding our picnic supplies above the water line. It was kind of like Oregon trail...but in a beautiful series of Indian Ocean inlets. And nobody's oxen drowned.

Then we braai'ed (barbecued) and toasted s'mores. I'd like to point out that I built that fire. Go me.

Bye Kosi Bay! Go little Rav4 Go!

[Eish!]

At the end of March, I am planning to run a half marathon.

Wait...sorry thats not right. Let me fix that sentence.

At the end of March, I am planning to run walk an entirely downhill half marathon over the course of four hours.

Much more accurate.

The Longtom half marathon is something that Peace Corps South Africa has been doing for about five years now. Its up in Sabie, which is beautiful, and I'm really excited that I'll be in this part of the world at the right time to participate. Also about the idea of even attempting my first organized athletic...thingy that isn't yoga.

The other really great thing about the Longtom is that it is a fundraiser for the KLM organization, which was set up by some PCVs from SA11 (I was SA15. I've just heard the un-holy rumor that they're now up to SA23.) KLM pays a complete 5 year scholarship for one rural Mpumalanga student a year to attend a fantastic private secondary school. Most of the kids are from the areas where my friends and I lived in Peace Corps, and it really is a life changing thing. The Longtom organizers ask that everybody who participates fundraise at least $100. So as you can see...I am now passing that information along to all 3 of you who read this.

Here is the information from this year's organizers:

Each year the Longtom Marathon Fundraiser provides two-thirds of the cost of the five year education for one learner at Uplands College. KLM relies heavily on the funds raised through the Longtom Marathon Fundraiser and needs the continuing support of PCVs to carry on their important work. Volunteers participating in the marathon are expected to fundraise a minimum of US$100 for the KLM foundation, but don't worry, that can be spread out over 4, 10 or even 20 donations. Each $5 donation helps out! Although $100 is the minimum requirement we expect that many of you will go above and beyond that. To encourage you to do so, the Longtom Committee has also identified target fundraising goals which are:· $100 - base· $250 - bronze· $500 - silver· $750 - gold

Here's how you can donate:

1. Go to the KLM foundation website http://www.klm-foundation.org 2. Click on the Donate photo in the upper left corner.3. This opens up a secure https connection for people to donate.4. In the Longtom Marathon field put "Rebecca Fielding-Miller" so they know the donation was made in my name. (In fact, feel free to put "Rebecca Fielding-Miller, MSPH")


$5 would be fantastic, $25 would be even better. I never do this, but this is one of those times where I can honestly vouch for the organization. I know this area, I know these kids, and I know that going to Uplands College really will change a kid's life. Plus...13.1 miles. Thats really far! Even if it is all downhill.

www.klm-foundation.org

Somebody in Johannesburg managed to get ahold of my credit card information and steal about $3500. God knows how, as you can clearly see from the timeline that I had 0 extra minutes for the purchase of anything.

This may mark my official retirement from public transport in Africa.

The first thing I need to say is that I now work in an office that sits behind a door which is clearly (and sparsely) labeled "STI" in big red letters. There are also numerous posters and pamphlets on how to recognize syphilis (hint: your downstairs is in an advanced stage of "OMG...what is that?") and what to do if you have TB. (Take your meds. Everyday. Try to avoid coughing on friendly neighborhood peace corps volunteers whose only mistake was to share a kombi with you on one fateful day...)

The above visual markers are a sign that I have begun my transition from random grad student researcher to person-with-actual-job-dom. I think I like this state, I've never experienced it before. For one thing, it comes with a salary which I find awfully novel and exciting. For another it kind of makes me feel like all those late night hyperventilations over biostats and car trips to Trader Joes whose sole purpose was to memorize/procrastinate on memorizing all the different classes of ARVs might actually have paid off. Who knew?

I will be enjoying this salaried state of existence for another 6 months here in good old Swaziland. (Sorry mom. At least its not the DRC!) After that...more grad school. I decided that what I really, really want out of life is a PhD. And to spend 3-4 more years being broke and living in a classroom/committee setting. But it turns out I really like research, and if I want to keep doing research, then I'd better get a degree that says I'm good at it. Besides...how awesome does Dr. Fielding-Miller sound? Pretty good, right?

I am in the US for all of six days for some grad school considerations and family time. To get here, I decided to take public transport from Mbabane to the Jo'burg airport since a) I had meetings in the morning and the nice van left at 7am, and b) it is cheap and so am I. I also thought it would be entertaining to keep track of what the process entailed, so I kept notes. Which I will now present to you.

10:30am, Monday: Meeting starts, 90 minutes late

11:45am -- Meeting ends. My ride ditches me and sends me with a different lady to go to an atm for needed cash.

12:00 -- I find the different lady who is to drive me to the atm for cash. We find said atm. She takes me back to the meeting hall instead of the taxi rank.

12:15pm -- random toothless man we wave down on the side of the road drives me to the taxi rank. The previous kombi (minibus) left 10 minutes previous. I am promised we will leave by 2.

2:20pm. Switch kombis, but still at the taxi rank.

2:30 -- Kombi leaves Mbabane. I am told I will switch again at the border.

2:45pm -- Arrive at the border. Stamping and queuing.

3:00pm -- Get in new kombi. Forced to airless back.

3:15pm -- Leave for Jo'burg

6:20pm -- Forced to switch kombis again at large mall in Jo'burg. I lose my shit with the driver.

6:30pm -- Switch kombis again in the middle of freeway. Old man loses his shit in a mixture of zulu and sotho because I am white.

6:45pm -- kicked out of kombi to travel last half mile on foot. Begin sobbing. Almost run over.

7:05pm -- South African Airlines begins trying to figure out what the hell a buddy pass is.

8:20pm -- Flight leaves. I am in business class. Success!!

Delta is currently having a pretty good sale. $990 round trip from DC or NY to Jo'burg or Capetown. Now is the time, people!!

I just came back from possibly the most epic vacation of my life (assuming three months sleeping in a tent on the ground does not count as a vacation and is instead in some separate category all together). Three days on Safari in Kruger, a night in good old Swaziland, and a week in Mozambique where I got to go DIVING in TOFO and it was REALLY REALLY GOOD.

Also...Maputo has lots of gelato, real espresso, and chocolate croissants. I am deeply in favor of every single thing that has happened to me in the last 13 days, with the possible exception of spending 8 hours of my life in a bus packed with 35 adults and between 6 and 8 breastfeeding infants. (They weren't always breast feeding though, sometimes their mom's would intersperse the breast milk with orange fanta. Thats healthy.)

I have an insane amount of pictures, but I also have an insanely slow internet connection. I promise to actually put some thoughts together and post those relatively soon though. I know I say that a lot, but this time I mean it.

Also...I wish I was still drinking espresso and eating chocolate croissants in Maputo. Next to a giant cement sculpture of an iguanadon. Like you do.

Or hanging out with lions.

I spent the morning sitting on my couch, listening to "This American Life," drinking coffee, and watching these monkeys hang out in a papaya tree in the yard. Not too shabby.

Turns out it was much easier to do than I was previously told. So...feel free to shower me with gifts. Or maybe just a post card or two:

Rebecca Miller

PO Box D379

The Gables, H126

Swaziland

(A note or two on there clarifying that you really do mean Swaziland and Switzerland wouldn't hurt. Wouldn't it be great if I was kidding about that?)

But not Boris the Spider.

I like to take pictures. Three of my favorite things are graffiti, bizarre signage (so many opportunities around here...) and some of the interesting critters with which I share my habitat. I absolutely have to post some of the amazing examples of that middle category in the near future, but I've also acquired some pretty good examples of the third lately. Which obviously I feel a need to share.

The elusive rainbow colored lizard. I have been trying to get a photograph of one of these guys since Peace Corps. I see them around some times, but infrequently enough that its always a little bit exciting. They're pretty, and fast...and may or may not have some sort of association with lightning. I'm still figuring that one out.

This dog's name is Sinkwa. Which means bread. Sinkwa is very ugly and very cute at the same time. She has some sort of neurological disorder and spends most of her time walking around in circles. Obviously she belongs to a Swaziland PCV.

I think this is a very small swarm of very bright green locusts. But I have no idea what a regular swarm of locusts looks like, or really even what a single locust looks like, so I could definitely be wrong about that.

A tiny little bright yellow slug. S/he lives on my windowpane from time to time.

A centipede? Millipede? What the hell is this thing? Whatever it is, there are a few too many of them in my house and they are a little bit too big for me to be comfortable with. I mean....squishing one would have way too much...byproduct. This one lives on my curtains. Obviously my solution to this was to buy new curtains.

Which means...stories. Or folktales. Or children's stories. Not to be confused with tindzaba, which are also stories, but stories that are true-ish, or explain something, or are possibly a report and/or meeting. Also, tingane-kwane almost always contain a song as part of the story, but those songs have their own word that I haven't quite figured out.

Anyways, I've been interviewing and transcribing like a fiend lately. More interviewing than transcribing really. Turns out I hate transcribing. I'm just going to pay my research assistants to do it while I lay on a beach in Mozambique. I think this is what it feel like to be half a step up from the absolute bottom of the food chain.

One of the most popular characters that keeps coming up in these stories is a guy/girl named Ncjane. (Incidentally, SiSwati is a really complicated language that doesn't always designate gender, and animal words tend to be genderless so...a lot of these stories may or may not be gender neutral? Which is completely fascinating in a country where gender is such a defining aspect of every part of your life).

Ncjane is a trickster. S/he is like coyote, or Anansi. He just goes around screwing with people and demonstrating all around cleverness. Sometimes ncjane is a jackal, but more often s/he is a rabbit.

As told by my informants:

Ncjane, the Elephant, and the Hippos“Ncjane was taken as a very clever animal. So she went to an elephant. And then she said to the elephant, ”Big as you are I can pull you down to the river” And then the elephant said, “Who, you? A tiny thing like this?” Ncjane said, “I can do it!” And then he went to a damn of hippos. He came to a hippo, a big hippo. He said, “I can pull you out of this!” And they said, “What, you!?” “I’ll show you!” So he got a very strong rope, gave it to the elephant. And to that one he said, I’ll be in the pool myself so that I can pull you. And then, he gave it to the hippo and said “because I want to pull you out!” So…these two big animals had to pull and pull! That story, they are trying to show that...don’t think, because you are big you can think bigger than a small thing.”

The above is hysterical in person, I promise. As is this one:

Ncjane and the Lion’s Den Now this story, it goes like this: “There was this animal, the lion. The strongest animal in the woodlands. Now, because it was kind of going out and hunting for food, and at the end of they day was always coming up with nothing, then it said to itself, “I’m going to stay inside my cave and pretend to be sick. And I’m going to scream for help. Each and every hour scream for help. So that when an animal comes inside…I mean, it will ask outside ‘what is happening? What is happening?’ I will say, ‘come in my friend, and help me.” And when the animal comes inside, he pounces on that animal and eats him. Such that it went on that way, it caught several several unsuspicious animals. Until that time that that animal he talked about –Ncjane! Ncjane he came. And he said, “How. Why are you crying so loud? What is wrong with you?” [The lion] said, “Ah…I am very sick. I urgently need your help my friend. If you could only come in.” And then Ncjane said, “No. I want so much to come in and help you. But when I look down I can see some of the feet of animals going in. But I don’t see them coming out! So I’m afraid I won’t be able to help.”

Swaziland, in addition to holding the record highest HIV, TB, and possibly moonshine consumed per capita, also has the highest amount of lightning strikes in the world. I think I mentioned that its the rainy season now, which usually lasts from about November/December through early February, and this tiny little country is more than living up to its statistics.

The storms here are wild. In South Africa I thought they were something, but here I feel like I've moved up to a whole new level. Like I've moved into a house that doesn't have a metal roof and so might not be immediately singled out for a lightning strike and so the weather gods decided we need to kick it up a notch. (bam).

There's a good storm starting up right now, as I write. I'm sitting at Mantenga Lodge, which is basically my office, and staring up at execution rock while the thunder gets ready to really make a statement. I've been chatting with a pair of Austrians one table over about their vacation through South Africa and Swaziland, and on the inherent 'awesomeness' of the house brownie. (Its certainly awesomely large.)

I like sitting here and watching the storm. The thunder is a constant rumble, there's never much of a break between rolls, and it feels like its coming from all around us. Intermittently there are flashes of lightning from behind the clouds and around execution rock. You always know when a storm is coming here. The air gets so thick -- mere humidity doesn't even begin to describe it. I think a few years ago I wrote about how it would twist and press and wring itself into such a tight, full feeling that there was nothing it could do next but explode. Here that still holds. It presses itself onto your skin, invades your lungs and your hair and your living room. You have to push through it to walk up a hill or out of a building. It gets hot, too. Miserably, horribly hot. While I admit that I am a giant whiner when it comes to any temperature below 65 degrees or above 85, I think its still too hot for any rational person to be happy with. I carry my lime green umbrella around with me everywhere. In the insane heat it gives me a little bit of shade, and when the intense rain inevitably follows, well...then it protects me from that too.

Now the storm is really going. The lightning flashes are getting more distinct. When they get really close they become so clearly laid out that you can almost see each little tendril of electricity shooting out in search of anything it can find to make contact with. It is cinematic. The lightning comes in a spectrum of yellow, green, purple, and orange tints, all on top of the same almost sickly shade that I can only describe as what electricity looks like straight. Or maybe its just my eyes that create that impression, like they need the color for a chaser after such a powerful shot of straight light.

After the thunder and lightning have made their points for a while, the rain gets started. And it can start fast. Today it looks like the most of the downpour might end up somewhere else, but on days when it does decide to come down on top of you -- look out. The rain will slam down with a crazy intensity for about 20 or 25 minutes, and then let up and vacillate between proper rain and a mild drizzle for the next 24 hours. Like it took so much effort to get out there, and put so much work into the initial downpour, it doesn't want to just walk away afterwards. I can respect that.

Now it looks like we're back to the light drizzle phase. Looking out at the mountain again, its become disgustingly beautiful here. The sun has begun to shine through the clouds, but there are wisps of cloud and fog drifting around the peak of Execution Rock. (The Austrian tourists, having finished their awesome brownies, are having a photography fest. Good call, Austrian tourists). The mountains are full of granite outcrops and slopes, and those have all transformed into impromptu waterfalls. Which the sun is intermittently shining onto and highlighting one after the other. The thunder is still coming and going, but it seems as if for the moment the storm has decided to direct itself elsewhere.

Ok, Ok. I'm sorry sorry sorry that I haven't updated at all recently. I've moved. Again. I now live in a place called Ezulwini, which translates to "The Valley of Heaven" and it is really beautiful here. Why have I moved yet again? Suffice to say that I really, really, strongly and adamantly recommend never staying at Veki's Guest House or doing business with it's horrible owner. What an awful experience. Can I jump up and down and wave my arms around for google to pick that up? How does that algorithm work?

Hey! Hey! Google! Over here! Veki's Guest House Veki's Guest House Veki's Guest House. SO. BAD. Avoid at all costs.

There, that will work, right?

Fortunately, while that was a fairly heinous experience, I am now living in the valley of heaven, and it is insanely beautiful out here. And rainy. But its all that rain that makes it so green and so beautiful. Here are some pictures of the area around me:

My front yard. This is the view I get to look at every day.

The shop down the road. If only it really were a coffeehouse, but thats ok -- there's about 15 more all in walking distance! Oh coffee, how I love you.

Monkeys! They dig through trash. These are not the specific ones in my specific yard, but the principle is the same.

More showing off of the gorgeous views from my house. Of the gorgeous, um, construction site.

Execution rock. Which, in the old days, the would throw you off of if accused of witch craft. Obviously this is also my backyard. Also, I plan to avoid being accused of witch craft while out here. Thats a long drop.

"Having a man or group of men talk about your body while you're just trying to go about your business is not just annoying—it sends the message that you don't have the right to be left alone, which makes the streets feel less safe."

I like it when I come across a sentence that articulates perfectly something I've been trying to sort out in my own head for ages. As much as I love living here, and most of the time loved living in South Africa, and had the time of my life travelling after peace corps -- the incessant cat calling and attention is maybe the absolute worst part about being a woman here. And it makes you feel like a jerk, because nobody is actually harming you or threatening harm (at least. not overtly). I think I need to think this through a little bit more, so I'll come back to it. But in the meantime:

Read more: http://jezebel.com/5677765/can-a-city-effectively-ban-catcalls#ixzz13xuQI1al

(the article is about NYC, not Africa, but whatevs)

A while back I said I didn’t want to really get into describing Swaziland and Mbabane because anything I said would almost certainly be wrong. That’s probably still true today, but I’ve been here for two months now and I’m willing to take a stab at it.

First of all, Swaziland is beautiful. I feel I have some authority to say this, being born and raised in one of the most beautiful (if also most boring) places on the planet to start with. The part of the country that I’m living in is nothing but mountains – I think I already mentioned that this place is like living in an MC Escher painting, where everything is uphill from everything else. Which is a pain when you’re on foot, but it also means that you’re constantly looking down into a valley, or up at some gorgeous hilly vista. Right now it’s the beginning of the rainy season, too. So all of those valleys are green and lush, and the mountains are beginning to be covered in wild flowers. The dirt is red – somebody told me that the insane amount of iron and other minerals in the ground means that Swaziland has more lightning strikes than any other place on earth. The red dirt and green bush together make for color so vivid it seems a little bit like you’re looking at a matte painting instead of an actual landscape, and in the late afternoon, when the light hits just right, you can look down over pasturelands or valleys and watch the shadows of clouds roll across all that color. In the middle of the morning, when it just starts to get warm, I like to walk down the road and smell the humidity and steam coming off the banana trees, and look down the red dirt roads with the bright green weeds and tiny purple flowers along the side as they meander off into the residential parts of the back of the city. A little river runs through most of the city, and while studying public health has ruined me a little bit, and all I can think when I see it is “mmm…giardia and bilharzi…gotta get me some of that!” I still like living in a place where an actual river runs through town and splits the shopping center in half. No matter how polluted, tiny, and possibly disease laden. Swazi people are very friendly – to the point where some Americans might consider their friendliness to be circling back around to rudeness. The phrase ‘none of your business’ is not a Swazi concept. Who you are, where you are going, and what you’re up to in the country is the business of anybody who wants to know it and a totally normal conversation to have walking to town or sitting in a kombi. This is the way it was in South Africa too, of course, but I feel like there’s a slightly different flavor to it here. In Steenbok I was fascinating because I am American white. I often felt like the fascination and questions I got in South Africa, especially rural South Africa, had more to do with the genuine curiosity of novelty. People weren’t really enquiring into a person so much as a strange phenomenon. Here, the questions are almost identical (if less fervent), but it has more to do with the fact that I stand out and am therefore…slightly more obvious to start up a conversation with. But this is a big city, with lots of NGO workers and ex-pats and Swazis of European descent, and I feel like my skin color is slightly less of a big deal. In some ways though, I miss the experience of living in a village. Again, you can pry my shower and internet out of my cold, dead hands, but this feeling of living in an ex-pat bubble is so strange. In Steenbok I felt like my very existence was like a lightning rod for the absurd. All I had to do was walk out the front door and something hilarious/awkward/disconcerting was basically guaranteed to happen. And that felt real. It was grinding to constantly be on show, and exhausting to never be able to show people that I was feeling sad, or angry, or frustrated (maybe that sounds strange and I could have, but at the time it never felt like an option), but it was strangely honest in a way too that I haven’t been able to replicate living in Mbabane. In Steenbok, I was a part of something. I was owned, or at least known. In my own way – even if it was different than everybody else’s – I belonged there. And I felt like I had earned that. Don’t get me wrong, I think this study is amazing and I’m working hard and don’t think I’m wasting anybody’s time out here – but I’m not sure what I’m earning right now.

Kenyan video game developers have partnered with Warner Brothers, PEPFAR, and "a behavioral change expert" to make a video game about HIV. The part where they also use it to collect information on current attitudes and behavior towards HIV and safe sex is a little bit problematic if they haven't made it very clear to people that their answers are being tabulated and what not. But still, pretty cool.

“In view of the importance of the study, and the fact that the study is in accordance with ethical and scientific standards, the committee therefore grants you authority to conduct the study in Swaziland.”

I have been granted authority. Boom.

My essential follow up question to this is: Does dropping banana bread off at the Ministry of Health count as a bribe? What if I only dropped it off after I get my letter? Because step two is approval through Johns Hopkins (hopefully this will take under two months – probably more like 3-5 days). I’m willing to overnight some banana bread, if that’s what it takes. I was really hoping to start interviewing people by this weekend, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. I’m strongly considering hopping on a 25 hour bus and going to Cape Town to drink some wine instead.

First, I should probably mention that when I said I would be here until February, what I actually meant was July. Sometimes I confuse those months. I want to make very certain that 2010/2011 remains as winter free as possible. I think I'm still traumatized by snowpocalypse. (aka snowmageddon, aka snOMG, aka Snowtorious BIG).

Second, you want to talk about culturally relevant narrative forms making a difference to HIV in southern Africa? I present to you porn with condoms. In SeSotho.

Third, I have my very own internet connection again. Yay!! It very much happened on Swazi time, which means I had to spend two days sitting in my apartment and getting hung up on by Swazi telecom employees, while being told that the person would be there to install it "soon" and so I should be sure not to leave the apartment so as not to miss him. Obviously it was not fully set up until about 6pm on the day after they told me that it would certainly be set up by. And then there was a giant thunderstorm and the connection went out almost immediately following but...you know. I have internet.

Still no letter from the ethics committee saying that I can interview people ("I'm sure by the end of the week" = "I hope you've got plenty of Glee reruns to keep you busy.") but on some level I'm sure its good for me to be adjusting to Swazi time. Probably. Unless I pull all my hair out and come back to Baltimore just in time for my scalp to be horribly frost bitten by whatever god awful thing winter decides to throw at me in revenge for skipping out on him for a year.

While sitting around on Swazi time with the internet installation dude, waiting for somebody from the internet installation office to call him back with a password I needed to access the internet (because why in the world should he be expected to have one of those in advance? I mean, he only drives around all day setting up internet connections all of which need a password) I got to talking about my project with said internet installation dude. Well, that and why I wasn't interested in cheating on my (fully imaginary) stateside boyfriend with him. But I found stories more interesting.

I told him the story of Rumplestiltskin. People. Have you listened to that story lately? Or told it? It is damn weird. We are a strange, strange society that we tell our children these things. In return, he told me a story about jackal and lion. And so, I present to you my very first (fully non-usable for my project) Swazi folktale:

So. This story is about jackal and lion. Jackal is a big white dog and lion is very scary but also very stupid. Jackal and lion were talking, and lion was complaining that he was very, very hungry. After going around for a bit, they spot some prey animals. Lion knows that if they go right up to them they will run away, so he tells jackal to go up and pretend to be their friend so that they will stick around. Jackal approaches the prey animals, lets say they're Steenboks. He says that he and Lion want to come and talk to them, but that they shouldn't be afraid of Lion. Lion is actually Jackal's servant. The Steenbok are understandably skeptical of this. Jackal says that to prove it, he will go and get Lion, and come back with Lion carrying him on his back, proving that Lion is Jackal's servant. The Steenbok agree, and Jackal goes back to explain the deal to Lion. Lion is less than excited about this idea, but he is still very hungry. So Jackal climbs up onto Lion's back and they parade up to the group of Steenbok. Then everybody laughs at Lion for making an idiot out of himself, and all the prey animals run away anyways.

Draw your own conclusions.

Walking through the Swazi Plaza, enjoying my caramel ice cream cone, I met a man who informed me that he was a travelling monk who had been wandering around the world for the last 14 years. He asked me for directions to the nearest Game (a store similar to Target), sold me a new age book on the spirituality of yoga for 1 lilangeni (20 cents), and told me I had a spontaneous spirit. ("spontaneous spirit" may or may not have translated as "low cut shirt").

I call that a successful Friday.

Swaziland has not quite discovered .pptx and .docx yet. Plan for this in the future.

(Which means I wrote a blog entry, but the computer I am currently using is pretty darn sure that it does not exist. Oh wait... Boom. Google docs ftw):

It is so strange to make this switch from a peace corps volunteer living in a village, walking to school and greeting all the old ladies every day – ok, being laughed at by all the old ladies every day, more accurately – to living in what is essentially the ex-pat dorm in the capital city, complaining that my shower has too much water pressure and gets too hot. Yesterday I was sitting around and talking with some PCVs* and RPCVs.** (This place is actually lousy with RPCVs, I don’t know why. I guess it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who can’t stay away.) We were talking about how out of touch the foreigners and the ex-pats we would run into during our service could be. The ones who work in the city and roll up briefly to clinics, schools, and orphanages for brief pre-announced site visits, and think they know exactly what’s going on. In a white SUV, of course. I remember writing my personal statement for grad school about something along those lines. There is an image that sticks in my head from when I was travelling in Malawi. A woman was begging in the road, she would go up to each car waiting at the stoplight and hold her hand out for change. Some people gave her money and some people didn’t. There was a white SUV in the line of traffic that belonged to some NGO or other – African Hope or some other generic name like that. The driver saw the woman, and the woman saw the driver and I just kept watching both of them. Finally, as the woman got to the white SUV the driver just…rolled the window up and looked away. And I thought – that’s the problem. The problem is looking away, or refusing to see in the first place.

But I’m starting to think it’s not as cut and dried as it used to be in my head. It becomes so easy to get disconnected here. Even in a country that takes all of four hours to drive across, with barely a million people in it, it is so easy to feel like I really have no idea what’s going on outside of my capital city ex-pat bubble. It’s not that I only hang out with Americans, I don’t. I walk around the city every day, I talk with my research assistants from the University, and the ladies at the guest house, and random people that I meet in town or taking a kombi somewhere. The thing is though, that’s all in Mbabane and Manzini, the two biggest cities in the country. It would be like saying I knew anything about rural Nkomazi after living and talking to people in Pretoria for all of a month. There is no connection there. So I’m wondering – how do I make that connection? How do I get out of this bubble?

Don’t get me wrong, I really like living in an apartment and sitting around with friends making pink and purple green tea cupcakes covered in sprinkles and watching Project Runway. This beats spending the evening sitting in my hut in Steenbok and staring at the ceiling by a few million miles. But I also miss sitting on my stoop (/cinder block) in Steenbok and waving at people at sunset, and being laughed at by old ladies on my way to school in the morning. I don’t think I have an easy answer or summary to the way I feel about what I’m doing now. I like it. I know how important it is for me to have a social network of some sort, and so I like the place where I’m staying. I love the feeling of independence that comes with living and working in Africa again, and so I like having random conversations with people on the bus or the ladies at the guest house. I’m so excited for when I finally get ethical approval (next week?) and can begin interviewing people in the rural areas in earnest about something that I find completely fascinating. But this disconnect…this gap between what is really happening and my experience of a place is harder to negotiate than I would have thought.

*Peace Corps Volunteers

**Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. Even if they refuse to remain returned.

I am moving across the street to my new flat tomorrow (YAY!), which means that I am once again packing up all my clothes into tiny little rolls and cramming them into my gigantic traveling pack. Which in turn means that I'm a little bit low on accessible clothing today. So, I'm wearing a skirt that I haven't worn in a few days (it comes right about to my knees, which is a little shorter than I'm comfortable with on a kombi or walking up hill on a windy day). The makes* at the guest house were very excited by this. Apparently, I've been wearing 'trousers' (the same two pairs of jeans) a little too often for their taste.

"Ah! Rebecca! Today you look so nice! Today you are a she, not a he!"

I think I should probably go clothes shopping asap.

*mah-gay. Mothers and/or women. Bomake is the plural, if you want to be grammatically correct in SiSwati about it.

I feel like this bookshelf says a lot about my next few months. I think I'm in need of some more trashy novels.

The taxi rank in Manzini.

Me and Latoya -- two years later. Aren't we cute?

They finally finished the garage -- can't you tell?

Ministry of Health meeting: accomplished. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been – once it was actually established that they hadn’t switched the meeting to the week before without telling me and that I’d have to wait until November before making my case. (There was a deeply unpleasant 36 hours earlier in the week in which that was nearly true). I’m not saying I particularly want to repeat the experience any time soon or anything, but I didn’t feel out of my league or like maybe I was about to be unceremoniously kicked out of Swaziland. Also, nobody threw stuff at me and yelled “Dance monkey! Dance!” Which I consider success any day of the week. They want some changes, but nothing terribly drastic. Hopefully me and my awesome research assistants can start interviewing people within two weeks. Hooray! Hooray! Right now I am in the waiting phase – waiting for final IRB approval, waiting on another potential project to sort itself out, waiting on the move to my new apartment. (Which should happen Friday. Theoretically. Probably. Hopefully.) This waiting phase is how I justified spending most of today in bed watching America’s Next Top Model (the one with the short girls!) and yelling “Ty-ty, you so crazy!” every time she talked about how letting girls who are 5’6 ½” rather than 5’8 model is revolutionizing beauty. Sorry Tyra, they’re still stick thin blonde girls. That particular revolution is a non-starter. My teachers in Steenbok would also point out the high degree of ‘portability’ inherent in a tiny blonde girl who is both a size 0 and 5’4. To this day I don’t know what it means to be “portable,” but based on my experience watching television and travelling around this week, it seems to be a physical trait that both rural South Africa teachers and Sports Illustrated value. So…that must mean something? I wonder if the fact that I am highly transient also counts as being highly portable and therefore ups my sex-appeal? Probably not.

Saturday morning I had a three hour meeting with a gentleman who will be helping me out a lot as an informant in my research project. It wasn’t an actual interview – I can’t do those yet – but more of a chat to establish things. I spent the whole time in fear that he would say something really, really interesting and I wouldn’t be able to use it. Science gives you weird priorities. As I just gave my research assistants an elongated lecture on the importance of confidentiality and privacy and so on, I actually don’t want to write all that much about what we talked about. Suffice to say though, this gentleman is completely fascinating. He and a driver picked me up in town and drove to his homestead. On the way he told me the history of the Swazi military, the University of Swaziland, and the first high school in Swaziland (all of which he was fairly instrumental in starting up) and then pointed out a few trees and other landmarks under which King Mswati II (the current king’s grandfather) and Sobhuza (the king’s father) used to sit or otherwise grace with their presence. So…that was pretty awesome. He also mentioned “that anthropologist lady who came through a few years back. I spoke with her here…she was also from California.” By “that anthropologist lady” he meant a woman named Hilda Kuper*, who wrote essentially the only Swazi ethnography anybody has ever bothered to write, and which people are still citing. (Mostly because it is, in fact, the only comprehensive thing anybody ever wrote, even if that writing happened in the mid-1960s and one or two things have changed a bit since). I’m excited to go back and talk to him for an ‘official’ interview. I have no doubt that it’s going to be a completely fascinating conversation.

*Because Lithuanian Jews by way of southern California really like doing ethnography in Swaziland. This is by far my favorite coincidence of the day.

Um…I’ve already said this to everyone I think, but in case you were still worried: I’m not in London, I’ve never been to London – though I hear it is a very nice city. I haven’t been mugged -- at gun point or otherwise -- and wiring $1,900 to a random Nigerian bank account is not going to do me any good. If you really like, I have my very own US bank account that you are welcome to donate to, but I’d be just as happy with a link to a youtube video of a monkey riding a turtle while wearing a cowboy hat. Or something equally awesome.I have to say, it makes me deeply happy that about 90% of the people I talked to in the wake of my brief flirtation with email disaster said something along the lines of, “Oh…I knew it wasn’t Becca. She would never use so many comma splices.” And people say that Comparative Literature is a useless undergrad major.

Yesterday -- while my email account was busy being hacked by Nigerian princes intent on terrifying my family members, supervisors, professors, and ministry of health contacts, ensuring that my mother never lets me leave the country again once I get myself back to the US – I was getting my butt back to Steenbok. (Mimic that syntax, random Nigerian hacker. I dare you.)

I left Mbabane at 6:30 in the morning, and made it to Steenbok at 11am. It was absolutely bizarre to be back on a taxi, driving through Tonga, Kamhlushwa, Naas, past Dludluma, seeing the signs to Malelane and Komatipoort. It was more disorienting by far than anything I’ve done yet since I got back. The time I spent in Steenbok seems so encapsulated in a way. These two years had such a discrete before and after. I am still friends with lots and lots of PCVs, I call Latoya occasionally, but that experience was so distinct. Its like a snowglobe, where I can look inside and shake things up but certainly never climb back inside. Or maybe its more like those little pill capsules, the ones where you can see the powder inside, and the little clear bit on the outside will dissolve in water eventually. Or stick to your hands if you handle them too much, which is why you’re not supposed to handle them too much. That’s what it felt like on the taxi in to Steenbok. Was this something I could go back to? Those two years – they are the most separate two years of my life. There is no bleed through. The person that I was, and the things that I did (in a good way) were so utterly of a piece with the place where they happened. I could not have been that person and done those things in any other place than Steenbok, and it has shaped nearly all the choices that I made since. I felt like I was rolling those little pills around in my hand, trying to play with what was inside, slowly eroding the barrier that kept then separate from now.

I shouldn’t have worried. Its true, of course. My time being a PCV and living in the village was totally contained and delineated in a way that few other experiences could ever be. And the phrase “you can’t go home again” kept rolling around in my head. Here’s the thing I learned though, and the thing I keep learning – people are people and they keep on doing their thing. Just because all I know about Steenbok are two particular years, that’s no reason to think that it really did just stay so separate. I walked into my key school, and waved at the first teacher I saw. Teachers came pouring out of the office and we were hugging and laughing and grabbing each other like we just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I am much slimmer now. Many people mentioned it. One of the best moments was walking into Bonga’s classroom. I stuck my head in, and all I hear is “NOMVUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!” and there’s 6th grader streaking towards me for one of the best hugs of my life. We went together to find my host mother, and Izora. Izora is…a person now! Not the loud fat dirty baby I fell in love with, but an absolutely adorable first grader with the cutest smile and absolutely no teeth from eating too many sweets. I asked her, “Do you remember me?” She did. It felt so good to hug her again.

I walked to another school, and there we repeated the process. The hugs, the exclamations, (the commenting that I’ve lost some weight and “now you look like a young lady!” WTF? What did I look like before?) I could only stay for a couple of hours, since it was going to be another 5 hour process back to Mbabane, but I swore up and down to come back. I got to see Latoya, only for a few minutes, she had to go and write an exam. She showed me pictures from her matric dance (prom) that they had held the week before. She looked beautiful, of coruse.

I know that right now I’m romanticizing my experience a little bit. It was a weird, fast, awkward, visit. I forgot that I did in fact live way the hell out in the boonies, and that I also lived in one of the warmer and dustier places that people can comfortably live without air conditioning. Assuming you vastly expand the definition of the word ‘comfort.’ I’m going back in a few weeks – with a rental car. I want to stay a little longer, so that I have the chance to sit down and drink tea and actually visit with people, not just drop in with a bang and a “hi! Bye!! I’ll be back!” All in all though, not such a bad start.

I did my first round of training on ‘qualitative methods and ethical considerations’ with my research assistants today. I am fairly certain that if you had asked me a year ago if I would be able to feel confident putting on a training for a group of Swazi university students on qualitative research methods (and also finding those students in the first place) in the relatively near future, I would have said: “What in the world is qualitative research?” My relative newness to the field notwithstanding, I think it went pretty well. I have a good feeling about them, they’re a sharp bunch (lucky me), who seem genuinely interested in learning about new ways of doing research. I like teaching, in general, and I like watching the evolution of understanding that happens even over the course of a few hours. As we spent a lot of time on informed consent and fairness to the participant, I won’t actually go into much more detail than that. After all, even if your respondent is happy speaking to you, is it fair to report out what they had to say if they didn’t know you were going to be telling other people when you spoke? (Did you follow that syntax? Good. The correct answer is ‘no.’) I make my presentation to the Ministry of Health one week from today. I have very little idea what to expect, hopefully it will go pretty well. Keep your fingers crossed next Friday that I perform my 15 minute song and dance in a way that Ceasar finds entertaining. Otherwise it’s being fed to the lions of “oh-shit-whats-my-plan-B?!” for me. I’d really like to try and avoid that. I keep trying to find a day to go out to Steenbok. I really, really want to. Just thinking about it makes me smile. But it seems like every day I make a plan (I love that phrase, btw. Very Swazi) every time I make a plan to head out there, something comes up for that day. I need to see an apartment, or have a meeting, or prep for a training. Now its looking like Tuesday. I so badly want to go soon. I want to see Izora and not let go of her for the whole time I’m there. I want to hear from Latoya and see Jabu and her baby. I want to give so many of my teachers the biggest hugs. There are so many people who were my community and my family for so long. Now that I’m settled in, every day that I think about just being three hours away from them and not getting to see them makes me a little bit crazier. Tuesday. Absolutely. I am clearing my schedule.

It seems that living in a city isn't nearly as interesting as living in a village or backpacking halfway (okay, maybe a quarter of the way) across Africa. Well, from a perspective of "here's a story about something absurd that happened to me yesterday and also 5 minutes ago" it's not as interesting, but Mbabane does have marginally more to do than Steenbok and for that I should probably stop pining for absurdity and be grateful.

Last week I spent about four days down in Durban at the University, eating a lot of curry, hanging out with a good friend, meeting the staff with who I'm vaguely affiliated (they're all completely lovely) and having quite a few really helpful conversations with people who have been doing this a lot longer than I have. I gave a brief presentation on what I'm doing out here, which was attended by 'the media' -- in the form of a very nice gentleman from the University newsletter. He took photos. Apparently I am a famous US researcher.

I've spent the rest of my time attempting to get myself situated -- finding university students who are interested in working with me as research assistants (my offer of payment: "On the days we go out to the field, I promise to take care of transport and feed you. Also, you get a certificate." I figure this is about equivalent to what I get to come out here, so it's fair), figuring out where, exactly the Ministry of Health has relocated itself to (the offices over the abandoned gas station, obviously), and generally sorting out my next six months in Mbabane. I want to spend some time describing Mbabane, and the bit of Swaziland that I've gotten to see so far, but I know from experience that I'll probably get it horribly wrong and only be embarrassed about my assumptions three months from now. So maybe I'll stick to the physical for now, and see what else I can figure out about this place later. Mbabane is a good city -- I like it. I'd rather live here than Pretoria, or Dar es Salaam, or Nelspruit for example. It's exceedingly small, in the way you'd sort of expect the capital of one of the smallest and most rural countries in southern Africa to be. Everything somehow manages to be uphill from everything else, a trick that I'm still not certain how the city planners managed to pull off but is definitely true. I live a 10 minute walk from the town center going (thats the downhill part) and maybe 15 or 20 minutes coming back (which would be the severely uphill part). "Town," such as it is, is glorious. There's a grocery store in which I can by quinoa -- quinoa, people!!! A few western-type restaurants (that means they sell coffee that approaches decency), a few fast food places, a couple of internet cafes, and lots and lots of shops where you can basically buy whatever you need. Sure, it still shuts down on Sundays and after 6pm, but mostly I feel like pretty much anything I need is just down the hill. I'm still adjusting to this idea. Fifteen minutes in the other direction is my gym (I know...a gym!) that is just as nice as the gym I went to in the US. It features circuit training, spinning classes (the major ex-pat social event on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, as far as I can tell), a restaurant with wi-fi and -- as happened a few nights ago -- occasional fire walking seminars. You don't have to tell me about the absurdity of this, I already know. In between me and town and me and the gym is this strange mix of University and NGO outposts (Baylor, Columbia, and UNFP to name a few, and I know JHPIEGO is lurking around here somewhere), middle-income type homes (middle income for Swaziland), kombis driving by, men and women in bright yellow vests selling airtime, and shockingly little livestock. I can't remember the last time I saw a goat or a chicken wandering around in the road. It's sort of freaking me out. Overall, it seems like the city is partially geared towards the general administration of the country -- government offices, people in suits, places for the running of errands -- parts of it exist almost entirely for the benefit of NGO workers, and parts of it are just your average city in which people are attempting to live and get things done and dodge everyone else who has come in for the day or the year. All in all -- not bad. Certainly not all that exciting, but not a bad place to hang out and shoot the breeze. Which was pretty much my entire goal in the first place. Success.

(aka: “Wait…you’re doing what where?”

I have -- as careful readers may have noticed -- recently moved to Swaziland after a two year sojourn in the US which – as even more careful readers may have noticed – itself followed a two year and change sojourn in South Africa. Why, you may ask (my mother has repeatedly asked herself, I imagine), have I gone back to the world of bucket baths and marriage proposals for six months and abandoned the world of Lush cosmetics and convenient roof-top gyms? First of all, I have a shower this time. This is a key fact, and maybe one of the most important things I learned about myself in Peace Corps: I really, really like showers. I may be back in southern Africa, but I’m staying in a very nice guest house and shortly moving to a REALLY nice apartment in the capital city (Mbabane). Bucket baths and chamber pots will happen only in moments of extreme extremity. I will still be taking “local transport” (kombis and busses), because kombis make you tough. Bucket baths may make you tough too, but I repeat: F that noise, I like showers.

That out of the way, let’s get back to the point. What the hell am I doing here?

For the second half of my master’s program I need to do a practicum. This means I need to go hang out ‘in the field’ for at least 3 months in order to prove that I actually do like the idea of international health and community based what-not, and that I have possibly even learned something about international health and community based what-not in the preceding 9 months of coursework. At the end of this process I hand over a 30 – 50 page essay about how educated I have become, and JHSPH cashes my check and coughs up my MHS degree. Most people are very smart and find a suitable international organization that places them in a suitable international internship, at which they possibly have a defined job and tasks to accomplish, and frequently somebody besides them makes at least one or two of the arrangements. (I'm not saying this is easy, I'm just saying it is the usual route). I am not this smart. I am doing an independent research project here in Swaziland that I spent about 8 months doing a lot of fast talking and application writing to get some funding for. Two organizations, the Center for Global Health at Johns Hopkins, and the Health Economics and AIDS Research Department (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu Natal, decided to bet that I’m maybe not a total idiot and are curious to see what I come up with out here. Which is as follows:

I am here to study traditional stories and songs. The idea is that stories and songs (“oral traditions / literature”) are one of the primary transmitters of cultural values in a society. Stories are one of the first things that you hear as a child, and they are a large part of how a culture explains and transmits itself. Stories, fables, myths, fairy tales, and all the rest, speak to people on a different level (I think) and as such are a really good way to access what is important and valued in a society. The idea is two-fold: 1) See what values and ideals are being transmitted in traditional Swazi stories in order to get an idea what cultural values and ideals may be affecting the spread of HIV in this country. What is the perspective on gender roles? On polygamy, relationships, the necessity of having many children, what it means to be sick and who is responsible for preventing illness/making you better? I think that stories and songs are a really interesting way to access these ideas. 2) What is the role and structure of these stories in current Swazi society? Can they – or something similar – be adapted to a curriculum of some sort that would teach prevention or harm reduction or care or whatever else? Do they still have enough weight to be useful (I think so) and are they a medium that people will recognize and respond to better than billboards and radio ads? (I hope so).

So that’s the plan. We’ll see how it works out.

Today, I find myself back in Pretoria. Two years almost to the day after I left. I like the symmetry of that. I have a distinct memory in my head of going downtown with Tessia just a few days after getting back from Peace Corps, stepping off a curb and getting slapped with something akin to vertigo. It was the bizarre sense that nothing had changed and the last two years had barely happened. Like a tesseract*, where you can fold space from one point to another and just skip over all the stuff in the middle. I feel like I’ve just hopped off another tesseract, from the point where I left this city two years ago and back to it today.

That said, holy damn, is Atlanta to Johannesburg long flight. But you know what makes it better? Business class!! (Who’s got two thumbs and the best aunt ever? This girl.) Sometimes flying standby can be a little nerve racking, but sometimes there are bonuses.

Here is all you need to know about flying business class: A ‘light snack’ is composed of chilled grilled shrimp salad, fresh fruit, and cookie dough cheesecake; you can LIE DOWN to sleep; and the chairs are massage chairs. Please, allow me to repeat: Your seat is a massage seat. You push a little button and the back of your airplane chair makes vague gyration-like motions intended in some way to mimic those of a masseuse.

As the plane landed, and I looked out the window at Jo’burg rushing up under us, all I could think was: “ohgodohshitholycrapohmanohgod”. But much less coherent than that.

Once I got off the plane I immediately spent the length of Terminal A all the way down to Customs and Passport Check rapidly cycling through a need to hyperventilate, cry, and throw up. I generally stuck with hyperventilate, because the other two seemed messy.

It occurred to me that this is practically too good to be true. I am going to one of my favorite places, to talk to people about my favorite thing, for a cause that’s deeply important to me, in a way that is – quite honestly – really really fun. And other people are paying for it! And I’m going to get a master’s degree out of it! Its just too good to be true. I think thats where a lot of my panic has been coming from the last few days – how is this not too good to be true? Why in god’s name are other people paying me AND giving me a degree to do something that quite frankly seems like the most awesome thing ever? Don’t get me wrong, I know that many many times this will be a giant pain in the ass, but still…good lord is this cool.

Thank goodness for the deeply fantastic seating, as the transportation I was so proud of myself for arranging ahead of time promptly failed to materialize as soon as I got off the plane. I got my bags just fine, wandered through customs just fine, and then…no convenient pickup. Just lots of other taxis offering to take me where I wanted to go for two to three times the rate. Not unfair prices, but still lots more than I was interested in paying. After a good 30-45 minutes wandering up and down the airport looking for my ride (did I mention thank god for the fact that I’d actually slept and eaten on the plane?) a lady at the South African tourism desk kindly looked up the number for the place where I was staying, but did not offer to let me use her phone. So I found a pay phone, found somebody else to get me change, called the backpackers where I’m staying right now and was told, “oh shit! We forgot to send the driver!” Did I mention how exceedingly thankful I was that I’d gotten some sleep last night on the plane? Fortunately there are several billion taxi drivers who are all exceedingly willing to give hapless tourists/researchers/morons like me a ride wherever they like (for a price) and the backpacker’s manager had kindly offered to make up the difference in the price they would charge me and the price that I had originally been told I would pay. So I found myself the very first non-official and vaguely underground ‘driver’ that I could (not on purpose, it just sort of happened) hopped into his car, and was off to Pretoria. (Mom, Dad, it was still safe. He worked at the airport, was an actual driver, was chatting with the ladies at the info/tourism booth and they were fine with it. He just didn’t happen to be one of the official OR Tambo taxi drivers).

Driving back into Pretoria was…the overused image that comes to mind is that of slipping on an old piece of clothing you’d forgotten about. Which is not perfect because its overused, to start with, but also because its not quite right. More like borrowing something from a friend for a second time after a long interval. Like a hat or a piece of jewelry you remember you wore to a club that one time and would love to try again. It was so familiar, yet still didn’t fit quite right because it never did in the first place. But in a good way.My driver stopped to ask directions and answer his cellphone once or twice, and each time I was ecstatic that I could still understand the conversation in IsiZulu. They were not exactly grammatically complex conversations (“which way is Hatfield?” “That way. Go straight for a long time.”) but still. Still!

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a cell phone (yesssss) and figure out how exactly I’ll be getting from Pretoria to Mbabane. I’ll also get to spend some time with Lexi and hopefully a PCV or three.YAY

*A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle. Go read it.

I'm leaving for Vienna tonight, to spend some time interning at the international AIDS conference. I will try and write a note or two while I'm there, but I might just be busy working. I had a moment yesterday though, that I've been mulling over since and wanted to try and articulate.

At the mall, a lady asked me if I wanted to sign up for some mailing letter, or something, so that I could continue to receive the company's excellent product. I said no thanks because I was just visiting, and she asked me where my home town was -- where was I going back to? And I realized that that was actually kind of a tricky question at the moment. Its not Baltimore anymore, its not Mbabane yet, it may or may not eventually be DC. I told the lady it was complicated and laughed, and moved on. Then I got to thinking, its not like this is the first or the last time in my life that that question has thrown me a little bit. Where do you live? Good question. When I was travelling and would have to mark my hometown on a border crossing form of some sort, it always seemed odd to write down a place where I hadn't lived in seven years. And then I thought some more -- of course it will always be Ventura.

The point is, the fact that it doesn't bother me for that question to occasionally be a bit confusing, but that I also have the security of knowing there will always be answer, well...thanks mom and dad. I'm going to head off and start doing ridiculous things for ridiculous stories again, but I could never do all this wandering if I didn't know for sure that there was something so strong right behind me.

Its been 18 months since I left. And in 3 more? I'm heading back.

Stories, songs, inane observations, and related verbal rambling to follow soon.

Recently, like just yesterday, Africa suddenly decided to get cold. I don’t know who is in charge of this decision, or why, but they are very arbitrary about it, and it makes me grumpy. Over the course of just two or three days the weather will go from crushing, unforgiving heat with insane humidity, to explosive rain -- thunder that shakes your house and lightning that blasts across the sky. I always thought it was silly to be afraid of thunder storms before I came here. I mean really, how can they hurt you? I don’t think its silly any more. Thunder storms here make you think that the world is being ripped apart around you, and you can only hope to come out the other end alright. After the rain, the next day will be cool and cloudy, and smell like wet clean grass and mud, and then it can go in one of two directions – either the day will slowly warm up, and the week will begin to get unbearably hot again until the whole process repeats itself, or for no reason I can figure out the day will stay cool, and the temperature will just keep dropping. And then it will stay like that, and there will be a bitter dry cold that cracks your skin and makes you seriously worry about frost-bite of the fingers or nose. Last year I started making myself hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, not so much for the protein as something to put in my pockets on the way to school so that I could keep my hands warm.

So just about yesterday, the weather decided to get cold for the first time this year, and I found myself once again cursing the South African winters. Admittedly, its not as bad as the summer, you can always put another layer on in the winter, but in the summer there’s a point where you really should stop taking things off. What really struck me though, as I huddled under my blanket and shook my fist at Africa (which, as we all know, is supposed to be HOT) was that this is the third time I’d done that. On one hand, this means that really you’d think I would have figured out by now that this happens every year and I should get over it, but on the other – this is my third South African winter. My time here is almost over. I have three months left, and of those maybe this one and a week of next will be productive getting-things-done time. The rest will be packing up, saying goodbye, getting around to those visits and conversations I’ve been meaning to for the last two years – finishing up sorts of things. Its very weird to think about, so mostly I’m not. I know that three months really isn’t that much time, especially considering how fast the last 22 have flown by, but I think I got through that time by making a point of never focusing on the finish line – its much easier to think about tomorrow. Sometimes tomorrow is too hard, and all you can think about is today. So today I’m in town, and I’m researching the trip I’m going to take after I finish up here, and I’m trying to get funding and books for our libraries, and I’m buying a bottle of wine. Today I’m going to worry about today, and tomorrow can worry about itself.

I feel like I might need to get ahold of this at some point in the near future. How useful for three months of travelling through Africa!

My newest project at school is a giant world map, approximately 15 feet by 8 feet that I am slowly and fairly tediously drawing out by hand. Before you start to wonder, yes, those two things making you go “wait a minute…” are still true. I am still very short (making those top 3 feet a little bit tricky) and I am still a very bad artist. But that’s okay, because where there’s a will for a low brain power yet high “oooh-ahh” factor…there’s a way.

Its done using the grid projection method, which most people experience for about 2 weeks in 6th grade, and then never have to worry about again. Basically, you have a picture. You draw a grid around that picture. Then you draw a much bigger grid somewhere else and transfer the small grid to the big grid box by box by box. In my case, 1,568 boxes over nearly 13 square meters. That’s a lot of boxes. The school staff thought so too, which is why the principal, deputy principal, and a significant portion of the teachers all spent most of their day standing around and watching me draw straight lines. It was apparently so exciting, in fact, that they also called the SGB chairperson, who immediately dropped whatever it was that he was doing to drive over to the school and stand in the crowd, crossing his arms and occasionally commenting on…something. I have never been so popular at school before.

We also spent a lot of time that day trying to find a way for me to draw all of the parts at the very top. Other volunteers have managed alright standing on a chair or a desk, however I had two fairly significant problems with this: 1) I am deathly afraid of heights. Standing on a rickety table on an uneven surface where every step or lean could send me plunging to my death from a horrific distance of 2 feet counts as heights. 2) I am so short that, even standing on that awful table, I could not actually reach the top of my latent map. So I had a problem.

The principal sent over the general worker (janitor) so that we could try and solve the problem together. Unfortunately, the general worker spoke exactly no English, and my hardware vocabulary set isn’t so good in siSwati. It turns out, for example, that the word for ladder is not in fact ‘iLadder’ (a technique that was based, of course, on the ‘el ladder-o’ theory of 8th grade Spanish/linguistics) but ma-steppa. It also turned out, once we made it past the language wall, that his ladder was a 12 foot high monstrosity made out of tied together tree branches that looked like it might come apart if I looked at it funny. Fortunately my siSwati for “There is no way in hell I’m getting near that thing, I will die instantly” has had some practice. (If you ever need it: “Anegke! Ngiyasaba!”) He agreed that it did look a teensy-bit unstable, but then had a really brilliant solution: Why don’t we just send a child up instead? (Perhaps on the theory that there are plenty of them and they are somehow expendable. I don’t know.) This was also not okay with me. I’m such a spoilsport.

Next somebody was sent for another ladder, but unfortunately it happened to be a stepladder roughly 2 inches shorter than the original table. By the end of it I was standing amidst the general worker, the principal, the deputy principal, the SGB chairperson, a teacher who really wanted to help, and somebody’s brother who has a truck and was therefore sent to get the step-stool ladder, waving my arms and trying to explain in two different languages that they shouldn’t worry about it, I’d figure it out, I’d come up with a solution, and while I applauded their commitment and appreciated how much they wanted to give me a hand, it would really be alright if they STOPPED HELPING. They were unconvinced.

In the end, I had to promise to make my very tall neighboring volunteer help me out over the weekend, and that we really truly, for honest, for reals would be okay without every ladder in the village. And then the next day Tom came over and helped me draw the top. I hate being short.

In all, the grid took about two days. Over the next few weeks I plan to transfer my small grid of world map onto my large wall grid of world map, and then magically come up with a map of the world that looks more or less like its supposed it. Then I’m gonna paint it. And then I’ll be remembered at Ekwenzeni Primary School forever – or at least until somebody decides to paint over it.

Today’s best quote: “This policy document is like the bible – it has all the answers.” And then my agnostic, insubordination-loving brain started to go: “grrr-argh-ahhh…Plooey!!!”

Immediately followed up by: “You know, if a woman sleeps with more than two men, she is a harlot.” In reference to a fairly intense discussion of what exactly the bible means when it refers to harlotry. The parts of my brain that hadn’t exploded after the initial comment -- the crazy feminist parts -- those promptly went “POP!” too. Now I’ve got nothing left.

Fortunately, these last few days have been all about the arts, and so I’ve been enjoying myself enormously. One of my favorite learners is a girl named Zanele. She’s bright, inquisitive, and speaks near-perfect English. She lived in Johannesburg before moving out here to live with her grandmother and has already skipped one grade, with the school considering skipping her again. Last term I asked the principal if I could pull her out of class during English and work with her in a sort of one-on-one GATE program. I’ve never taught GATE before (I’ve never taught much of anything before) so it turned into a very student-driven sort of thing. Zanele set whatever topic she was interested in, I would try to dig up as many resources and facts as I could find, and we would discuss it all until she was satisfied and decided to move onto something else. The only thing I really set in stone was that I wanted her to ask as many questions as possible. She was not allowed to read and regurgitate the information. She had to come with new questions about it – or anything else that struck her fancy – each time we met. So far we’ve discussed world history, astronomy, volcanoes, and Plato. At the end of last term, she told me that she would like to talk about Shakespeare when I came back. And my poor, literature-deprived, recently exploded brain said, “Hooray!!”

Yesterday, then, I spent a lot of time talking about Shakespeare with Zanele. We talked about the language he used (still English, but “deep” English – a play on “deep” SiSwati, which is the official formal sort of language that they use in Swaziland, and that we certainly don’t use here.) and why people still care about his plays 400 years later. Then we started on Much Ado About Nothing, because everybody reads Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet is a little over the top for a 12 year old, and as awesome as Rosalind is in As You Like It, the constant character gender-bending might get a little confusing. The Taming of the Shrew was not even up for discussion, might I add. Plus, I think I may be able to track down a copy of the movie Much Ado About Nothing, in which Kenneth Brannagh is a little bit ridiculous, but the story comes across pretty well*. Anyway, we started discussing the play. We read through the beginning of the first scene together, and then I spent a few hours summarizing the first two acts for her – a sort of home made Cliff Notes.

The other thing I did yesterday was make a whole lot of learning aides. Alphabets, number lines, vowels, and individual desk name-tags for each learner, including a little decorative alphabet. Because I didn’t want to waste the school’s ink, I printed each of them out in black and white, and then spent most of my day coloring them in. It was like kindergarten. I got to have a coloring day. A Shakespeare and coloring day. All while a Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits CD serenaded the office over and over again.

Yesterday was a Shakespeare-coloring-Dolly Parton sort of day. Today is shaping up to be a Shakespeare/Chaucer-coloring-Dolly Parton sort of day. Just what I needed to regenerate those brain cells. This is my nine to five.

*I majored in literature. Can you tell?

Being a Peace Corps Volunteer grants a sort of flexible identity. “Us and Them”—this concept of ‘the other’ what was so fashionable when I was in school – becomes a little bit slippery. There is one clear us -- other volunteers, especially those in your group, though not necessarily excluding those of other years or other countries -- and that is stronger than almost anything else, though it’s not completely inviolable. But the questions start to come when I wonder who, exactly, ‘them’ is – and what are we to others, an ‘us’ or a ‘them.’ (Stick with me, here.)

It is our job to be flexible, to be sinuous and a little bit tricky. We are told to integrate into a village, to learn the language and the customs, to take a new name and do our best at the laughably impossible task of blending in. So we do. I’ve learned SiSwati, kind of. I work hard to make friends and to gain the friendship of those around me. I only use my right hand or both hands to give and take things. And it’s worked, kind of. One of my proudest moments here was when a teacher said to me, “Ay Nomvula! UmSwati, really!” (“Nomvula, you are really a Swazi!”). I’m still weird, sure. I still talk English funny and have those darn blue eyes and blonde hair, but I’m an understood weird. I’m not just *the* other, I’m *our* other. Close enough, I’ll take it.

So I can walk in the village. I am a part of things, even if briefly, and in a way I become a part of us. But then I leave, and there are other places I can walk – by virtue of my language, my education, my nationality, my gender, my upbringing, and an ugly fact in this country is by virtue of my skin color too – that my friends or teachers in the village can’t. Nomvula and Becca aren’t entirely the same person, 98% overlap maybe, but not 100%. I can walk into a resort hotel or nice restaurant and know the rules and be accepted, because that’s where rich Americans go. I can go to the Afrikaan pub in Malelane, because while I may not be quite ‘us’ there, I’m certainly not ‘them’. With some friends, over a year ago, I found myself in a township outside Pretoria, a place where I almost certainly would have been in deep trouble were it not for our guide vouching for us – instead we became ‘us’ and spent the evening drinking beer and arguing about Generations. Last month a friend and I met the wife of the Irish Ambassador to Lesotho. She offered us a three hour ride to town (“I knew you guys were Peace Corps as soon as I saw you. I love Peace Corps!) and we spent the time chatting as equals about Africa, Dublin, America, and all the rest of it. As a volunteer, I feel like we have so many opportunities to switch that it does two things: At once it obliterates any sense of ‘us’ or ‘them,’ because when you are granted the ability to walk through walls it becomes more difficult to pay attention to them. But at the same time the only people experiencing this sensation of walking through worlds, of belonging everywhere and nowhere, are other PCVs. And so while everybody may find some way to accept me, and I them, its as if the line becomes even more starkly drawn between the only us I ever really use, and the rest.

We work – well, maybe I should stop talking for other volunteers – I work in one of the poorest areas of one of the most schizophrenic countries in the world. On one side of the divide is this conservative rural village, where culture and tradition are still the trump card, where there is extreme poverty and child-headed households, and no running water, and some of the most beautiful and heartfelt music I’ve ever heard. On the other side is a country that could be Europe, western and wealthy and occasionally even cosmopolitan. These two sides, they don’t understand each other so well. I came home one day after a braai to tell my shocked family, “did you know Afrikaaners eat pap too?” “They do??!!”

We can, I can, walk that line and see both sides. Becca and Nomvula, the part that walks in both and tries to balance perfectly on the fulcrum. I go to grade 7 functions at my school, and celebrations at the US Ambassador’s house. I send my reports to the Lubombo Circuit Manager and Congress. It is odd, exceedingly extremely odd, to live on that pivot point and have access to so many worlds. I am not a tourist in a human zoo, I live here. I am not an awe-struck kid, I grew up with this.

I've just gotten back from a fantastic three week vacation all over the place, it was very refreshing and probably one of the best holidays I've had here. We went pony-trekking in Lesotho, which was phenomenal. Two days, six hours of riding a day -- I've never had my butt so sore in my life, but it was totally worthwhile. Lesotho is very mountain-y, and a lot of the time the trail was nothing but incredibly steep switchbacks, anywhere from 8 to 36 inches wide, covered in scree and perfectly round smooth rocks, with a 300 foot drop off a cliff right on the other side of it all. But the view certainly is beautiful from that drop-off. Occasionally it would be so steep that the guide, Mpho, would tell us, "If you guys are nervous, you can get off and walk down the trail," "Um...do you think we should walk?" [Pause. Pause. Mpho eyes nervous horses as they refuse to get within 15 feet of descent. Pause]. "If you guys want...you can get off and walk down the trail." We got off and walked. That night we stayed in an incredibly rural village, a little bit past the middle of nowhere, where our horses decided that they were tired of nothing but grass, grass, grass all the time and wanted some delicious mealies instead. Unfortunately, this delayed our departure in the morning a bit, since the owner of the mealie field was exceedingly pissed when he found out. Somebody had to run for the chief, who then had to negotiate a settlement between the field owner and our guides, which of course took several hours. Had I not spent the last 20 months in Africa, it might have been a fun and authentic addition to out trip. As it was, we were just irritated. TIA. After Lesotho we headed on to the mountains and the beach successively and had yet again a fantastic time. All in all, a great vacation.

One phrase I did keep hearing -- and that I have been hearing, and even use myself -- is "the real Africa." As in, "well, the Wild Coast is beautiful, but its not the real Africa." "Cape Town is a cool city, but its not the Real Africa." "Come on our tour and see the Real Africa!" What does that mean? What is the Real Africa? There is a universally understood sense of what you mean when you use this phrase: The Real Africa is somewhere poor, somewhere rural, somewhere black. It's somewhere where you can still see women carrying things on their head, and watch handicrafts get made, and see people walking everywhere and depending on subsistence farming. Why is that the Real Africa anymore than Pretoria or the wild coast or anywhere else? Why is it that the preconceptions of Africa become our definition of what is real? The realest, most scraped-to-the-bone place I've ever been in South Africa was a township about 10k from Pretoria. But nobody would ever consider it the "Real Africa."