From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (read aloud txt) 📖

On the way home, as a diversion, we decided to stop off at the Swazi Sun Hotel and Spa in the Ezulwini Valley to have lunch and check out the spa. In California, Wendy periodically liked having massages, and she had heard that this spa was good and reasonably priced. The hotel was located next to a very green golf course, which was in sharp contrast to the surrounding brown and red terrain. The large gates, like the outside of the imposing hotel, were white, giving a strong colonial feel to the place. We walked through the elegant and formal lobby to the poolside bar, which was serving lunch. Although the pool and surroundings were more modern than colonial, the whole ambiance was of white wealth. And even though some of the guests were of color, I speculated that thirty years ago, it was a very pleasant, refined retreat where white South Africans could indulge themselves in relaxation, gambling, and sometimes other vices not readily available in South Africa. It was still a beautiful resort, and although the gambling was less of a novelty, it was supposedly still a great place to spend a weekend with your mistress.

After leaving the spa, we went home to pick up my computer and head to the Mountain Inn so I could send e-mails to cancel our hotel reservations in Maputo along with my Monday meeting in the TechnoServe Maputo office. We bought steaks and a bottle of wine for dinner. The steaks were good, but they weren’t the fresh seafood we were expecting by the ocean in Maputo. And the wine was bad; we threw half of it away. Overall, we had survived, and it wasn’t a tragedy, but I still worried whether we were in the country legally.

On Sunday, since we hadn’t gone to Maputo, we had the opportunity to go to a small going-away braai (Afrikaans for barbecue) for one of the TechnoServe employees. She was going back to the United States to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Braais are very popular in Swaziland. This one was held at Mlilwane (hum the M-lil-wahney), a small game reserve close to Mbabane, that was mostly limited to various members of the antelope family but also had warthogs and hippos. When we arrived, the warthogs were plentiful and running free through the camp.

I hadn’t had a lot of up close and personal experience with warthogs, so I didn’t know how meek or aggressive they might be. Consequently, I was a little nervous as a large warthog began poking his tusked snout into some of our food, right next to where I was standing. In the United States, the only animals I’ve ever confronted to protect picnic food have been aggressive birds, so I didn’t exactly know what to do. Initially, I made some mild shooing noises and gestures but was ignored. Not wanting to appear too timid to the rest of the group, I gathered my courage and lunged aggressively toward the warthog; fortunately, he backed away because I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t.

Later, we saw a number of people congregated by a short stone wall adjacent to a small lake, so we went to see what was happening. Immediately on the other side of the three-foot-high wall was a gigantic hippo. We could easily have reached out and touched him. We didn’t think touching would be advisable (hippos look cute but kill more people than any other animal in Africa), but we did enjoy looking close up. The hippo was probably the size of Wendy’s Volkswagen at home. He seemed calm, perhaps even a little dejected as it appeared that he had a cold. Both his nose and eyes seemed to be runny, and we felt sorry for him. We felt for him even more because some of the young warthogs who were also in the area seemed to be taunting him. The young warthogs would approach the hippo’s head and attempt to kick dirt in his face. When the hippo turned and bared his teeth, the warthogs would quickly retreat, but then they would come back and try again. Naughty boys trying to show off, I’m sure.

As we sat and watched this scene continue to play out, six more hippos, both babies and adults, emerged from the swampy pool and joined our friend on the shore behind the wall. They seemed to be eating a bit and socializing with each other. A number of warthogs were also eating and socializing in the same area. It was a very cute pageant. After watching for a while, we decided to go. As we were leaving, we took a better look at the low wall that had separated us from the hippos. It continued on for about twenty feet, but then it ended, and there was nothing to keep these gigantic animals from going around the ends!

On Monday, our office manager called the Ministry of Immigration about our little mix-up at the Mozambique border and was told that we would just have to explain the next time we were passing through immigration on our way out of the country. I hoped that it would work.

On Tuesday, as we drove up the Malagwane grade to work, we were reminded as to how treacherous it was. As we rounded the last sharp curve before Mbabane, we had to slow because of all the cars, including police, on the edge of the road. A number of people were standing and staring over the sharp cliff. The missing section of guardrail gave a big clue as to what had happened. In the next day’s paper, we read that a woman had been driving up the grade, rounded one of the sharp curves, and almost hit the center divider. She overreacted, whipping the steering wheel in the other direction, sending her car through the guardrail and over the cliff. Her car flipped at least once and plunged over three hundred feet down where it came to rest upright. The woman, who had been protected by her seat belt and airbag, was able to climb out of the car and had only minor injuries. A passing motorist had climbed down to help and handed the woman a cell phone. She called her husband to tell him that she’d had a minor accident on her way to work. When the husband arrived at the scene, he said he nearly had a heart attack. Needless to say, the car was a total wreck, and the woman was very lucky to be alive. The crash was the headline in Wednesday’s paper, a welcome change from the usual stories of political corruption and family violence.

The following Saturday, one of the business advisors in our office, Sonnyboy, was getting married, and a number of us from the office had been invited. Seven of us drove in two cars to a small rural town about an hour and a half north of Mbabane. Most of the drive was on tar (paved) roads, but as we neared the town, we turned on to a good dirt road for the last few kilometers. As we drove among the homes and small farms, I remarked that this was the scenery of a developing country, not like what we saw every day in Mbabane. The wedding was to be held in the auditorium of the local high school. We pulled into the high school grounds and parked with the other cars on the grass. It felt like a movie scene of a small town in the rural Unite States preparing for a hometown football game. We walked through the high school grounds, which were quite extensive, to reach the auditorium. The high school construction seemed simple and uninspired but functional and solid. The floors were smooth poured concrete, the walls concrete block, and the roofs galvanized steel. The auditorium had a high ceiling with exposed wooden trusses holding up the corrugated metal roof. It was not large, seating approximately two hundred people in molded plastic chairs. However, one side wall opened with large doors to an anteroom that sat a hundred more. Both rooms were full.

Because we had heard that these events never start on time, we had arrived later than most and were lucky that the people in the other car had saved us seats in the main hall. We sat down as the preliminaries were starting not knowing what to expect, except that it would be a long service. Just to clarify, this was a Swazi-Christian wedding. The Swazi traditional wedding would be the next day and would be only for the family. The service started with singing by what was called a choir but was more gospel ensemble than traditional choir. There were six singers with microphones and amplification. They were accompanied by an electronic keyboard with built-in electronic background rhythms. Two very large speakers flanked the group. Their music sounded familiar but was not exactly like anything I’d heard before. It sounded like American gospel combined with the type of African music recorded by Paul Simon. It had the same effect as American gospel. Most people in the audience joined in the singing, and many stood up to sway with the music. The entire three-and-a-half-hour service was filled with music. After every scripture reading, prayer or speech there was at least a choral response and usually a more formal “Musical Item” as described in the program. As with the preliminaries, these performances by the choral group were usually joined by the rest of the congregation. The songs were familiar to everyone because as people joined in, they not only knew the lyrics but were singing in multipart harmony. The effect was wonderful. It gave a great feeling of warmth and togetherness. We felt very happy to be there and not at all awkward to be the only white faces in the crowd.

After the preliminary singing, the wedding began with the procession of the wedding party down the aisle. But this was not a traditional procession and “The Wedding March” was nowhere to be heard. There were five bridesmaids beautifully attired in lavender satin dresses accompanied by five groomsmen in black suits with white shirts and lavender neckties. They paired up at the rear door of the auditorium and then each couple did what I would call a “disco-stroll” down the aisle to music with an appropriate beat. Each pair took several minutes to dance down the aisle. After they had all reached the front of the room, the groom appeared. He was dressed in a white, four-button suit with a black shirt and a gold tie. He stood out like an eighties Motown rock star. He waited in the aisle to greet the bride as she was escorted down the aisle by her brother. The bride wore white. It was a beautiful (aren’t they always?) traditional wedding dress. Once meant to symbolize virginity, nowadays all U.S. brides wear white. Apparently, this is also the custom in Swaziland since the bride and groom had a three-year-old son together and appeared to be pregnant with another.

Besides the singing, the remainder of the three and a half hours was comprised of evangelical-type prayers, a rousing sermon, ceremonies, and laudatory speeches by friends, relatives, and multiple ministers. It would have been more interesting to us if it hadn’t all been in Siswati, which we didn’t understand since everyone in our workplace spoke English. Occasionally a word or two of English was spoken to describe the next event, and we were able to figure out where we were in the program. Most of the time, we were clueless. We got occasional help from the Swazis in our group when we were supposed to do something. One of these explanations came near the end