Staff Blog

I Will Miss

As I’ve been thinking about my departure I’m aware of the things that I’m leaving behind, and I want to share what I’m going to miss. 

I will miss waking up at 5:30 am.  I’m usually the first one up, and when I go outside to fetch water to bathe it’s still dark and the stars are still shining brightly in the sky.  Everything is calm and peaceful, and quiet except for the roosters crowing to announce the impending day.

I will miss bathing in the basin in my room.  I put my music on. I wash my hair and then tie it up in a ponytail.  I put soap on my washcloth and clean my body. Then I step inside the basin and wash off the soap. I get water everywhere, but that’s ok.

I will miss making the tea and the toast for my Make (mother in SiSwati, pronounced Ma-gay) and Babe (father, pronounced Ba-bay) in the morning. Making the tea and toast could be a representation of my whole experience. This started in a roundabout way, with me making toast and tea for myself and then being instructed to make it for my Babe as well. For the first 5 weeks I would work myself into a state every morning when I entered the kitchen and started making breakfast. Talk about a bad way to start the day and an incredible waste of energy.  I finally decided I’d rather not spend the rest of my summer hating an integral part of my morning routine that I didn’t intend on changing, so I attempted to change my attitude. It worked. Gradually I learned to stop hating what I was doing and after a couple of weeks I realized that I actually enjoyed it. My host parents got so much joy out of me making their toast and tea for breakfast every day that I came to love that I could gi! ve that to them. 

I will miss riding the kombie in the morning. I will miss the cool morning air breezing through the window, the rattling of the ramshakle vehicle as it drives over bumpy roads, and the smell of soap and clean clothes as people get on the kombie fresh and ready for the day.  I will miss greeting people as I enter the kombie and being greeted, “Sawubona, Fikile. Ungeni?”  (Hello, Fikile. How are you?), and then being squished, four people to seat that should hold three. I’ll miss the kombie driver’s laughing eyes and booming voice, and the conductor’s mischievous smile.

I will miss driving home with Babe. It’s just been in the last few weeks that we’ve been driving to work and back, I’m not sure why.  But my Babe doesn’t like to drive so now I drive most of the time. I like getting in the car at the end of the day and us setting off together. Usually we are quiet, but sometimes we talk about our day or things that have come up. We bump along the gravel roads at 35 km an hour, winding our way from town to home.

I will miss the sun going down as we drive home.  The world is bathed in a warm golden glow, and there is one spot in particular that takes my breath away every day.  We turn a corner and the sun is setting over the mountains to our left.  The mountains are a silhoutte against the pinkish-orange sky.  I can’t describe it, but it’s beautiful.

I will miss walking onto our homestead at the end of the day.  It’s so calm and quiet, and the view of the small mountain across the valley is beautiful.  Sometimes Sengetto runs up to meet me if I’m carrying a bag, and takes it from my hand. Other times it’s so quiet I think that no one is home, but usually I find Ma working on something in one of the kitchens.

I will miss going to the garden in the late afternoon. Usually we are too late, but sometimes I make it home a bit early and my mom, Sengetto and others from the support group are working in the garden. Sometimes I help Sengetto to water Make’s vegetables, other times I sit and watch as people hoe and plant and fetch water. Children are not supposed to be in the garden, but sometimes they come and sit on the edge. In the last few weeks they’ve finally grown used to me, and now they climb all over me and repeat, “Sawubona” (Hello), “Ungeni” (How are you?), “Niapila” (Fine), and “Nyabonga” (Thank you) over and over again to me, as these are the few SiSwati words that they know I know.
I will miss cooking and doing dishes in the kitchen attached to the house. It’s in a perpetual state of chaos, every surface covered with dirty dishes, clean dishes, old food, and garbage.  It used to stress me out every time I went in there.  But cooking and doing the dishes are the first and most prominent ways that I found to involve myself in the family.  I’ve also found them to be activities that can ground me when I’m having a bad day.  And I’ve learned to work around the mess, to let go of my need for it to be clean and organized, to ask for things when I don’t know where they are and to clean up a little when I have the time.

I will miss making the tea for Make and Babe after dinner. And they’ll miss it too. Whenever my impending departure date comes up or someone asks my Babe if he’ll miss me, he says, “The tea after dinner and the toast. I’m going to miss the tea and the toast.”  I interpret this to mean, “Yes, she’s wonderful and I’ll miss her very much.”

I will miss my walk to the toilet before bed. My favourite place in Swaziland is midway between the house and the pit latrine, where I look up at the stars every night before I go to bed. Sometimes there are many, sometimes just a few. I don’t know if there are more or less than I might see at my dad’s in Canada, but there is something about looking at the night sky from that spot that gets me every time.  I feel calm.  I feel touched by the vast beauty of space. I feel grateful to be in Swaziland. 

I will miss going to my room at 8 pm and taking my time as I get ready for bed. I wash my feet and my face, I brush my teeth. I get into bed and may write in my journal for a few minutes or read my book.  I like this quiet time by myself at the end of the day, without pressure or agenda, just time for me to putter a little and come down from the day.  Usually I turn the light out at 9:30 pm, but there have been many times that it’s been before 9pm.  I wouldn’t entertain this as a possibility in Canada.

I will miss having eight hours of sleep every night and feeling rested every day. I’m exhausted by the end, but I rarely feel tired or low energy throughout.

I will miss doing my laundry by hand.  I sit on the cement ledge that surrounds the house with my basin of soapy water and my basin of clean water. I bask in the sun and enjoy the view overlooking the valley to the mountain beyond.  I am calm. I am usually tired and sick of washing by the end, especially when I have my jeans or sweaters to do, but I feel such a sense of accomplishment that it’s worth it.

I’ll miss that I use a bucket and a half of water a day when I’m at home here. Total. That’s for washing myself, water I consume and water for dishes. If I’m doing my washing I use three or four additional buckets. It frightens me to compare this to the amount of water that I use in my daily life in Canada.

I’ll miss the pit latrine. The pit latrine has not been a big favourite for all of our students, and it definitely took some adjustments for some of them to get used to using it, but it doesn’t bother me. And what I love most about the pit latrine at our house is that it doesn’t have a door. Well, there is a sheet of warped tin that is meant to be used as a door, but it doesn’t fit all the way across the doorway.  It takes ten minutes of fiddling with it to get it so it covers part of the door without falling over, so I’ve just stopped using it. Luckily I haven’t had any awkward situations because of this, and the view across the valley is beautiful.

I’ll miss how everyone here is referred to in terms of a family relationship. Young women and men are sister (sisi) or brother (budi), middle aged women and men are mother (make) and father (babe), and older women and men are grandmother (gogo) or grandfather (makulu).  I love when someone I don’t know calls me sisi, and I love thinking about all older women as mother.  I think there is something beautiful about this way of relating, of the recognition of how each of us is part of the same human family. I’ve even started thinking about people at home in these terms, but I imagine I might get some funny looks if I call my house leader Ma or the gas station attendant Brother. 

I’ll miss all of these little pieces of my daily life, these things which I’ve come to find comfort and peace in. But of course, mostly I’ll miss a few very important people.

I’ll miss my friend Gcebile.  We haven’t spent as much time together as I would have liked, and so sometimes I still get a little apprehensive when I know I’m going to see her. But every time my worrying is in vain, and I’m surprised by the ease of our connection and how, despite our vast differences, she can read me and understand me better than some people I’ve known for years. I’ll miss her easygoing nature and her quick smile. I’ll miss her honesty, her intelligence, and her passion for helping people.  She is hands down the most generous person I have ever met. She’ll give every last penny that she has to her mom if she calls and needs something and spend her last 20 cents on candy for her son.  Unfortunately next to her I feel selfish and undeserving of my economic privilege, but I’ll carry her with me now and try to think of her when I’m having a bad day or deciding how to spend my money.  And of course I’ll miss Gcebile’s little three and a half year old son Sethu, w! ho is one of the cutest children I’ve ever known and now apparently asks for “Loleen” every day.

I’ll miss Sengetto.  Sengetto is fourteen years old and has lived with my host parents here for a year and a half now. I don’t know how that came to be, but what I’ve gathered is that my Babe came across him somewhere and took him in. He’s lost both his parents and had never been to school until he came here. Now SWAPOL pays for his schooling and my parents look after him. He does everything around here. For me Segetto is a bright light.  I think he gets a kick out of me, as almost every time he looks at me he has a big smile on his face and is quick to laugh at me for almost anything I do or say.  He speaks broken English, and I know just a few words of SiSwati, but we manage to have simple conversations and understand each other most of the time.  He loves my camera and takes incredible pictures. I’m sure he could be an amazing photographer if only he had the resources and the opportunity.  From Sengetto I’ve learned how to work hard with grace and a sense of humour, and t! hat it’s possible to be connected to and care about someone without many words ever having to be exchanged.

I’ll miss my Babe.  I think perhaps he has been my greatest teacher here. Perhaps one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had. The first few weeks were very frustrating for me as I tried to relate with him and then a month in I realized that if I was going to make it through this experience I needed to do some things differently. I decided to try and let go of the frustrations I felt about our relationship and see what happened.  And somehow, first with great awareness and effort but with increasing ease, I noticed that when I let go of my reactions towards him the world didn’t fall apart and I didn’t lose myself. And, I started to like him.  I was able to see that his stating the obvious comments were efforts at connection, his telling me to put on my closed toe shoes or my sweater were his way of caring for my well being, and what I thought were judgements were actually projections of my own fears.  I was able to see his easy going nature, his good heart, and his desire for!  me and the students to have a great experience in Swaziland.  I’m incredibly grateful to him for welcoming me into his home, his family, and his life.

I’ll miss these people dearly, but most of all I’ll miss my Make. I spent my first few weeks here wondering if she liked me. It wasn’t that she was outright rude to me but she can be a bit abrupt.  However, eventually I realized I’d been caught up in how hard it was for me to be in a different place, but didn’t think about how hard it must have been for her to have a foreign young woman staying in her home. Also, her English is very good, but it is her second language, and of course that provides a challenge for communication. Throw in cultural differences about how to interact, the relationship between mother and child, and the role of women and it’s pretty much like feeling around in the dark for points of contact.  But going through the routines of everyday life together helped us to find our way. 

Before long I stopped taking her apparent gruffness personally and realized that she actually really appreciated my company.  I started noticing that she was always happy to see me and I could put a smile on her face with most of the things that came out of my mouth.  I used to think that she was judging me all the time, and I was afraid that she would think that I was lazy or incompetent. But after awhile I realized how much she appreciates my help around the house, that every time I do the dishes or cook dinner it means she doesn’t have to do it.  When I make her breakfast or tea after dinner she gets to feel what it’s like to relax while someone does something for her, instead of her always looking after everyone else.

Also, about midway through my time here I realized that I was happiest when I could be at home with her.  I don’t know why exactly, but most of the time I am calm when I’m with her. We don’t talk much, but sometimes she tells me things about her life or life in Swaziland. Mostly though I think we just enjoy being together, being women sharing the same life.  I think she likes that I support and appreciate her and I like being with someone who knows and cares about me in this foreign place.

Being a woman in Swaziland is not easy.  She works hard to take care of this homestead.  Most homesteads in Swaziland have tonnes of people on them. That means tonnes of mouths to feed, but it also means tonnes of hands to do the laundry, the dishes, the gardening and the cooking.  Here it’s just her and Sengetto (she has one son who is off at boarding school).  And she’s not a young woman, especially by Swazi standards. She doesn’t know her exact birth date, but she’s in her mid to late fifties.  She’s got high blood pressure and chronic pain in her back and left arm.

As a Swazi wife she has little power in the home but many responsibilities. She does all the cooking; she has to be home at all times because there always has to be someone at home to look after the homestead and her husband is often away. She tries to make some money for herself by selling airtime for cell phones and the vegetables from her garden but this only earns her a few dollars a week.  Therefore she is financially dependent on her husband. This helped me understand why there can be such disparities of income and standard of living in the same household. All this is to say that I empathize with her. She wakes up in the morning and does dishes (without a dishwasher or even running water), cooking, laundry (done by hand), gardening (without a reliable water source) and a lot of time on her own to look forward to.  She may not be smiling all the time, but she courageously gets through the days.

Sometimes I feel like her daughter and sometimes like a partner. My favourite moments are those that I feel we are a team, when we are working together in the kitchen or when she asks me what I think about how we should do something. I love that.  I love when she asks me to do things because I take it to mean that she can trust me and depend on me. I’ll admit that there are still moments when I am frustrated, but what “mother/daughter” relationship doesn’t have frustrations?  Mostly I’m just grateful for her, for her love, her trust, and her sweet smile.  I love that I can bring her joy. I love that for three months I’ve been able to ease her load a little by helping with dishes and cooking.  I hate that I couldn’t do more and that when I go she’ll be here on her own again.  I’ll always have a warm place in my heart for her, Make Kunene, my fifth mother. 
I’ve lived here for three and a half months, and now it is time for me to go.  I’ll be honest, my time here has been very hard. I’ve travelled to many places in my life, and in each one there has been at least one thing that was unique to that place that I loved. I still haven’t found that here, not in the food, or the music, or the landscape or the culture.  But I have made a home here, and I have made relationships with a few people, and for that reason Swaziland will always be a very special place for me. Because of this it is hard to go, and perhaps it’s harder still knowing that when I say goodbye to my friends and family here in a few short days it may very well be the last time I ever see them.  I will never forget them though, these people and this place that have taught me more in three months than I can comprehend.

-Lauren Nagler, Intercordia Mentor in Swaziland and L’Arche DayBreak Assistant