Zombie Land

3/1/2011

Zombie Land

I’m angry. I’m pissed off.

I walk into bars, with my Swazi friend, Mamba, hoping to start a conversation. I’m tired of teaching in “settings”. The classrooms, the youth centers, the conference rooms. I want to see the guts of Swaziland. I’m done tip toeing around. I have 5 months left and it’s time to dive right in. I want to understand the environment in which people have sex so casually and dangerously. Cops at bars, sex workers in bathrooms. The rich white, colored (the preferred term instead of bi-racial) kids with daddy’s credit cards. The unemployed. The managers of factories. S&B workers and head teachers. I share drinks and befriend the sons of ambassadors and former ministers. Their family close to royalty.
I gyrate with the rich in flashy “nightclubs”. I peek into shady sheebeens (bars). I order beers and chat with the Swazi drunk and soon I discover everyone has something interesting to say. I latch onto anyone who will chat. I sit silently listening to the drunk poor out their deepest secrets. The things they would never tell their teachers, their bosses, a reporter, a surveyor, or scientist, their best friend, or wife. The same stories. “I think my girlfriend is cheating on me.” They tell me. They pull me in with sympathy and pity. I feel for them. “And I think my wife is too.” I get angry. “You’re the reason this country is dying! You’re the reason your people only live to be 33 years old. Villages of people 15 and under! Don’t you see!?” I pull my hair out and my Swazi friend intervenes to smooth things over. “I’m trying to show them!”I shout at him as he pulls me back. “No Meredith. You’re trying to piss them off. There are two ways to make change happen. And one will get you a bullet in the head. Stop pissing people off.” He shouts back.

Their stories and reasoning was all starting to make sense to me now. It was the international bureaucratic aid agencies I struggled to understand. Blindly dumping food off the back of trucks. Paying caregivers money instead of food. “Please.” They tell us. “Please tell them to start paying us in food again, our husbands take our money and use it to get drunk. We have no food now.” The NGO turf wars. Meetings only to schedule other meetings. Nothing actually ever discussed or determined or DONE. Only scratching the surface. And peace corps itself. Millions of taxpayers dollars going down our idealistic drain. A world of acronyms and their ignorance to understand the ACTUAL environment in which this disease spreads in THIS country. Maybe they’re not the lunatics. Maybe we are.

“We need jobs, not donations.” Mamba tells me. It’s not the people we need to change. It’s the environment that is causing the people to behave the way in which they are behaving. I’m trying to understand this environment. Swaziland isn’t like Asia’s drug injectors and prostitutes or the US’s homosexuals. Here there is no clear box to put those at risk in. Here, everyone is a target. Everyone is using sex for power.

I want to leave the dry technical, counting pills, weighing babies, teaching “Life Skills”, world and plunge into the brains of people who know more about what was going on then I did. Who had the experience. Who lived everyday in this sexual web of transmission. I had lost my way in this labyrinth of relationships and it was time for me to sort it out, to finally understand the reasoning behind the, what seems to us, idiotic (almost suicidal) actions of the people here.

And I didn’t have to go far. Mamba is a manager of a backpackers just outside the city of Manzini. One day, off running errands, he leaves me alone there. I sit outside on the verandah, sipping my instant coffee. A car pulls up and a middle aged man steps out. His expensive suede shoes and Swazi plates on his car tell me what he is here to do. Most backpackers in Swaziland refuse business to Swazis. Why? Because of what is about to happen next. His young beauty waits in the car until she is given the all clear. I remember Mamba telling me once, “I could make a fortune on this place. I get at least 5 people a day asking, begging, me to charge by the hour. This place is just right outside the city, so no one can see. You get the wife coming in with her secret lover, she goes. Half an hour later her husband walks in with his secret girl. I refuse these people everyday. I am not a brothel.” The man causally walks over to me blocking my view of the television. In between me and The Kardashians, OK now I’m pissed. “We don’t charge by the hour.” I say, hanging upside down on the couch chewing on a straw. “I’d like a room for the night.” I get Mamba on the phone and they talk it out. He calls to his secret lover. Flogging lipstick and plunging neckline steps out of the car, I search her face for any sign of guilt or shame. Just another empty face, another blank stare, another walking zombie. She follows him into the bedroom.

“The fan is broken.” He calls out. I bring him another one. As I set up the fan I’m screaming in my head, “What are you doing?!” Thirty minutes later, after their mundane dank sex session, the man comes out. “We’re going to town for a bit.” He says. “We’ll be right back.” Mamba is back, and he pays him before he goes. “They won’t be back.” I say. “I know.” He says.

Sometimes I find myself with the conquering settler’s complex. Fucking idiots, I think. Why are people risking their lives for sex? These people must have no developed conscious. They seem to lack any spark of reason. Critical thinking and problem solving is almost impossible for them. I think.

I walk the streets of Manzini, these untamed sights, smells, customs, men shaking the urine off their dicks in broad daylight in front of you. I am above this. I think. Smug.Why couldn’t I have been placed in a country whose people constructed ornate languages. Vast cities. Invented new systems of mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. People who are graceful, sensitive in human relations. Who write poetry about human existence. Who don’t latch onto our culture and twist it in a way that suits them.

“I don’t get it!” I shout to Mamba. “Why are people behaving this way when they have the education?! They know the average Swazi lives to be 33 years old. Why doesn’t that scare them? One woman once said to me, ‘Life ends today. Nothing else matters.’ How can they so easily just line up and let this disease take them?” He shakes his head, nibbling his cob of maize. “They haven’t given up. You say the average Swazi lives to be 33? For the people here, once you’ve had children and established a home- life is over. You’re done. You’ve done everything a Swazi can do. And most of them are achieving this before 33. It doesn’t sound that bad to us.”

I realize now. These kids don’t need “HIV lessons.” They need direction. There needs to be more to life than just sex and babies. People needed to learn to explore themselves and the world around them. It’s what I’ve been trying to teach in my school and girls clubs. They’ve been bred to accept, never question. They sit in my class and stare. Zombies. “Make a collage of who you are. What you like. What makes you angry. Who you love. Your passion.” I have to define the word passion. An idea foreign to them. Every girl makes a collage of becoming a nurse, teacher, or soldier. She cuts out pictures of Beyonce and Rihanna. The boys draw pictures of soccer balls and Manchester United. I don’t see them anywhere on there. “Simphiwe.” They tell me. “Your collage doesn’t have a job, a husband, or a child.” I tell them, “That’s because there’s more to life. So much more.”

“What is happening in Libya?” I ask my high school students. They look confused. “Libya? They’re asleep right now.” They laugh. “Don’t you read the paper?” I ask. They laugh. “Yeah, you do.” I continue. “ But you flip straight to the back to see how your friend Rooney or Messi is doing. Don’t ya? There’s more to life than soccer people.” I shout. I tell them what’s happening in Libya. They don’t care. “Does this affect you?” I ask. “No.” They tell me. “And how much more are we all paying for public transport now?” They know the answer to this question. “Did you ever stop to ask why?” I explain to them the relationship between Libya, oil, and the rest of the world. I tell them what happened in Egypt, what may happen in Tunisa and Algeria, now Yemen. I hold up the Swazi Times. “Teachers Protest. Nurses protest.” It reads. “Revolution can be contagious.” I say. They ask, “Revolution?” One student raises his hand, “Change.” He says. “YES!” I shout. “The world is more connected than you think. You’re apart of this world. It’s time you start caring and seeing the bigger picture.”

HIV lessons on the back-burner. I bring newspapers to class and we discuss what’s going on “out there”. These children have no access to information. Only through a paper they cannot afford. A newly built library sits unused on school grounds (paid for by PEPFAR, from a previous volunteer). Thousands of books still in boxes from another volunteer. “Have you guys ever used the new library?” I ask them. “The teachers say we can’t.” I ask, “Did you ever ask why?” They shake their heads. I tell them the books are here, and the teachers couldn’t be bothered with organizing them. “If you want a library, make it happen. If you want CHANGE make it happen.” They laugh. “I will march to the deputy’s office today and ask for the books if you will help me. And together we can put them into the library and finally have the information we want.” They cheer. “Revolution!”

Everyday I fear it’s too late for me. These children need role models, but at the high school level can they really be formed, inspired? Some days you teach and you see that girl nodding in agreement and the young boy’s mind starting to turn.. thinking over your words. These are the days you hold onto.

“Girls are just as much to blame.” Mamba tells me. “I cannot date Swazi girls. There’s nothing there. You try to talk to them and they ask you, ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’ They want to just have sex and that be that. Marriage sex and babies. Nothing more. No one knows how to communicate what they’re feeling. The girls are cheating and the boys are cheating. And no one says anything.”

Another kombi ride home. Suffering from squashed knee syndrome yet again. I sit with my knees pressed together, propped up against my chest. I carry surveys I had given my students that day. Questions asking them about their attitudes on relationships. A man in his thirties sits next to me and reads the questions out loud. (Little does he know I purposefully carry the questions outside my bag to spark some sort of conversation with anyone willing to talk.) “Yes. I agree.” He shouts. “Sometimes a woman does deserve a beating.” The woman next to him laughs. The next question, “Is it OK to have a secret lover?” He shouts, “Of course. I mean. Let’s say I am fighting with my girlfriend. Then I can have another for when things go wrong with the first one. I cannot just break it off with her. Do you know how hard that is?” The next question reads, “Why is the HIV rate in Swaziland so high?” He scratches his chin, “I don’t know. You tell me.” He says. I point to the previous question that read, “Is it OK to have a secret lover?” He laughs. “I think we should agree to disagree.” He says.

It’s only in this world, that you realize with HIV education, HIV lessons are the last thing you should be talking about. I bring the world to the classroom and I make sure we are sharing and discussing it alongside our opposite sex. We get comfortable with the topics at hand and the people who we are discussing it with.

“You’re always working.” Mamba tells me. “You can’t ever just NOT have a conversation with strangers can you?” Sure some get threatened that I’m muscling my way into their world. But I try to work to find the balance between shaking them up and pissing them off. I heed to Mamba’s words.

“Americans. You volunteers. When are you going to realize, you aren’t going to get the revolution you hoped for here. We’re Swazi, and we have to do things OUR WAY.” Mamba tells me. We’re back at his place, his friends, drunk on marula. The traditional brew, two sips and any sized man is done for. “Look at Mandela.” He continues. Mamba’s friends, their drunk eyes hanging on to every word he preaches. “That man started out with fists a blazin. He didn’t care who he pissed off. The elders didn’t take him seriously. No one did. But when he came out of jail, he had a sense of calmness. He said to the people, ‘I am for black empowerment. And I am for white empowerment.’ He shook the hands of the white men who once held him down. This is what causes change. Revolution. It takes time. You’ll see. You Americans think just turning a monarchy into a democracy will solve everything. We are not ready for a democracy. You think you know everything.” I laugh. “I may not know everything now. But just wait Mamba.” I tell him. “I’m going to go back home and get a masters in International Policy! And whoop your ass in every historical/political debate we get into!” “No.” He laughs. “You’re going to go home and get a degree in What’s new with The Kardashians Policy.” I shout back, “Well..they’re international. No one knows what the fuck their ethnicity is. Except, hot.” Mamba shakes his head in disappointment.

His drunken friend, I call Depeche Mode (for his love of the band) and who calls me Demi Moore (from the movie Ghost) holds my hand. “I can tell you haven’t felt love in a long time. You’ve lost something.” I roll my eyes, not again. He begins to sing. “You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin! Woahhhhhhhhhhhhh that lovin’ feelin!” “And what do you know about love?” I ask. His wife at home, his girlfriend sitting next to him. He laughs. “Ah. We’re Swazi Demi. We know we cannot live like you Americans. We cannot live, ‘Forever. Forever young. We don’t want to be.. Forever Young……” And a new song begins.

I escape the horrible 80’s sing a longs and take a walk outside. I stand on a bench, enjoying this lighted pause of the early evening. Nightfall approaching and a cool chill in the air. Goodnight sun, I say. I sit and watch, silent, for once. The boys are singing God Bless America now and Mamba stands behind me. I point to the fields of green and brown. “What is with Swazis and growing so much maize? I mean it’s not drought resistant. They shouldn’t be growing it in the low veld. I mean look at all that maize out there.” I point out at the field ahead of us. “That’s sugar cane you idiot.” Mamba laughs.

I’m slowly learning that once I stop the static of endless arguing and macho posturing, once I stop and just listen, there is so much to be heard.

Being here almost two years, I still feel like I’m gazing down the wrong end of the telescope. Where the reality, that big picture lies concentrated at the end of my long, distant, and sometimes distorted view. The truth, to me, is shrunken. Immature, stylized. Making sense and connection with me only through symbolism. Just when I think I’ve got the big picture, it’s gone before I know it.

It’s always been so much easier to look in things in an either or perspective. In boxes and categories. To give up and just say, “This is not a country of reason or logic. A nation of 15 year olds.” I say to Mamba. “There’s a historical reason, a cultural context behind all these things that don’t make sense to you now. You may not agree with it. It may not justify it, but there are reasons for the things we do. You’ve been here less than two years. You can’t possibly understand.” I hold on tight to this. I have no wish to blame a country or its people. A country and a King that has invited myself and Peace Corps here to help.

“We are not here to be activists.” Our country director tells us. “We are here as developers. There are rough times ahead and we cannot get caught up in it.” Peace Corps warns us the direction this country is headed and we aren’t to tell anyone or get involved. “You aren’t allowed to have these conversations with anyone. And for god’s sake, don’t blog about it!!” The CD yells.

Sugar cane surrounds Mamba and I. I listen to the wind. I listen to his words.

I try hard to listen now.

“So what WILL you tell your father when you get back home and he asks you again, ‘How much MORE do you appreciate your country now?!’” Mamba asks me.

A long pause.

“You're keeping quiet now huh? That’s a first.” He laughs.
“Shh. I’m trying to listen now.” I whisper.