I apologize for the long hiatus. My life here in Swaziland
has gotten very hectic as of late.
There are two reasons Peace Corps will remove a Volunteer
from a site: something dramatic or dangerous has happened, or the community or
host family are just not working well with the Volunteer. After a long,
frustrating, and challenging year, Peace Corps has decided to relocate me for
the second of those two reasons. I am unharmed and safe, but I do want to catch
you up on what has been happening.
Why I Have Moved
Before I moved in, Peace Corps evaluated my site. They spoke
to the inner council, who said that if they got a volunteer in the community,
he or she would live with a particular family (name intentionally withheld).
Our staff visited that particular homestead, and they were shown the house. The
host father (babe, in siSwati) reassured them that the roof did not leak. He
told one staff member that no one had lived in the house for a long time, and
another that his sons were currently living there. After careful evaluation,
Peace Corps gave him a list of necessary repairs, which he promised to do.
As I learned (the hard way), the entire roof leaks. None of
the repairs were made. When I asked him for help, he was reserved. When I
called Peace Corps to help with the repairs, he became angry. Eventually, minus
the horribly leaking roof, the house became habitable. When I was at a training
in November, I came home to a broken window. Since babe’s job is installing
windows, he promised both me and Peace Corps that he would fix it. He did not,
and I had multiple things stolen that were within reach of that broken window.
When I went to Cape Town in April, I came back to another broken window.
Shortly after that, I visited my friends for a weekend and came back to find my
third window broken into (although the glass was intact). Most of my food was
stolen in that break in. PC had enough of waiting, and they brought the glass
to the homestead. It still sat in my hut for weeks before I harassed babe into
fixing the window.
PC started to believe that the site was not a good place for
me at this point. I have very aggressive dogs, and that means that all 3
robberies were committed by someone known to the dogs. Since we never figured
out who it was, I will not point fingers erroneously, but I will let you draw
your own conclusions.
Things came to a head at home when babe and I had a
miscommunication. I ran out of water, and there was none on the entire
homestead. I called PC, and they brought me 200L in some barrels. This greatly
upset babe, as he felt that I was reporting him and making it look as though he
was mistreating me. He did not tell me that, however, and we interacted with
friction for the following month. PC sent a staff member to intervene, and she
did an excellent job of smoothing things over. He was, however, never quite the
same to me. Your host family is supposed to be your first place of safety, and
I had become very distant from mine. I had a wonderful relationship with the
host mother (make) and her children, but as my father will tell you, I do not
exactly go out of my way to handle male egos with kid gloves.
The host family relationship was one factor. Another was
that I was being sexually harassed daily, and on my homestead. Men would come
from the bar next door (which babe did not tell PC about) and shout at me from
the fence. When I walked to the school, I knew of at least 3 men that would
seek me out. When I rode the bus, I encountered another persistent man and one
persistent woman, who wanted me to marry her son.
Two of the men were mentally handicapped. There was one who
used to shout at me, but lately progressed to hugging, hair touching, and hand
holding. My efforts to shake him off were ignored, and my efforts to ignore him
were provoking instead of deterring. One day he was particularly aggressive,
and I called to some women to help me. They laughed, and moved farther away. It
was explained to me later that in Swazi culture, it is the norm to laugh at the
actions of the mentally handicapped until someone gets seriously hurt. That
situation had the potential to get very unsafe.
In another incident, a friend and I were harassed by a drunk
and violent man in the bus rank in our shopping town. I was surrounded by
community members, who laughed instead of helping. Total strangers ended up
helping us, and they were shocked at the behavior of the people in my community
that were present.
Finally, I had no reliable transport. There was a stretch of
4 days where the bus did not come once. It regularly broke down, and once I had
to walk 6K home in the dark. My options to leave were to call a taxi (which is
very expensive) or to hitch, which I am not comfortable doing. If I had had a
medical emergency, I would not have been able to leave. That is a violation of
our policy, and so this is the reason that Peace Corps is giving to the
community for moving me.
Mixed Feelings
I have a Swazi best friend. We talk about everything and we
are extremely close. We work together on every project and I cannot imagine my
service without her. Now, it’s no longer a matter of imagining, but a reality.
She lives far from me in a place I am no longer allowed to visit, and her phone
does not have WhatsApp. We had a successful food preservation project in
progress, and many PCVs and PC staff bought her jam, honey, and atchar.
I wrote about my library project in a previous post. After
months of struggle, it looks very different. My librarian walks in early, and
when I arrive, she tells me what she wants me to do. She then settles in and
continues her work. She works before I arrive and hours after I leave for the
day. She is so proud of our little library, and takes both ownership and
initiative. I’ve spent a year of my life working on building that relationship
and that library, and I will never see its completion. I know that I leave a
sustainable project in very capable hands, but that does not make walking away
any easier.
I was not allowed to tell anyone that I was going. The van
came, we loaded my things in, and then we pulled out. My friend stopped by that
morning and saw the van loaded with no warning. She sobbed on my porch and
hugged me for an hour. I thought my heart would break. Leaving the people I
grew to love and who loved me back was brutal, but walking away from the
negatives is far easier.
I’ll be able to feel safe when I sleep in my bed at night. I
don’t have to psych myself up for the walk to school. I no longer have to feel
afraid and anxious to ask the family to help me repair my roof or help me in
any other way. I can feel relaxed and happy, instead of living in a state of
constant fear and anxiety. I have been unhappy and stressed for far too long,
and that ends now. That knowledge has brought me a sense of peace.
Looking Forward
My new community has a lot of resources that my old one
didn’t. At my old school, the children wore ratty second-hand uniforms from a
variety of sources and no shoes. Here, the children wear identical uniforms,
flawlessly washed and pressed. The struggle for basic needs to be met isn’t as
prevalent here. There is poverty, but it isn’t the abject poverty to which I
had become accustomed.
The high school has a debate team and a GLOW (Girls Leading
Our World) club that I plan to work with. I loved debate in college, and I am
very passionate about the empowerment of young women, particularly with
self-advocacy in relationships. I would like to start a BRO (Boys Respecting
Others) club to work with the young men on gender and health issues. The
library has only college textbooks, so I plan now to apply to Books for Africa
again and try to start a library with novels that the children will enjoy
reading. The biology teacher approached me about hosting a science fair, so
there are plenty of programming areas there too. For the first time, I find
myself overwhelmed with eager counterparts and a plethora of projects that are
within my capabilities, means, and interests to complete.
The new community is located in the southern region of the
country, Shiselweni, and is near a town named Hlatikhulu (for those of you who
like to look at maps). I live right off a tar road and transport is always
flowing, so that is no longer an issue. Proximity to the urban areas has really
affected the attitudes of the people in my community, and I am working with a
more progressive mindset and educated population.
I do not mean to imply that the last year will be easy. The
developing world has a set of challenges for every situation, no matter how
many resources are available to each Volunteer. Although now I’m working with
far more resources than I had, I still have no established relationships, no
existing projects, and no clue what I’m doing. To put that another way, I’m
still in the Peace Corps.
I’ll get photos of the new site up soon, as well as more
posts on Swazi culture. I have a very busy month or so up ahead as I finish up
my applications to graduate school, which means I’ll need to be online more
often. I’ll make it a goal to get blog posts done as I go to town for internet.
15 months done; 10 to go!
