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

Settling in

Familiar Work in an Unfamiliar Environment

On our first morning in Swaziland, we both suffered from serious jet lag caused by the nine-hour time difference from California. We had essentially switched night and day. I got up in the middle of the night to read for two hours before returning to bed, and we both slept in until 10:30 a.m. After breakfast, we weren’t sure what to do. While we were in a beautiful setting, we were basically trapped because there was nowhere to easily walk, and we didn’t have a car. We had been told that the conference center had a workout facility, so we asked for the key. We walked to what turned out to be a one-room cottage with a few dumbbells and an all-purpose exercise machine with missing parts. We hadn’t expected much, and so we weren’t disappointed, but we never went back. We exercised briefly with a set of elastic tubes that I had brought from home, and both of us tired really quickly.

We didn’t have Internet access at our cottage, but we had heard that we could get on and check our e-mail at the Mountain Inn, a very pleasant sixty-two-room hotel at the top of the Malagwane grade overlooking the valley below. Many years earlier, the family who owned the Emafini Christian Center where we were staying had purchased the Mountain Inn when it was a famous brothel and converted it. Liz, our landlady and the matriarch of the family, volunteered to drive us up the two miles to the inn.

As we arrived at the Mountain Inn, we breathed a sigh of relief after the quick trip up the Malagwane grade, a very steep and winding section of the highway to Mbabane. The Malagwane grade would never exist on a four-lane highway in the United States. It was too steep and had excessively sharp curves. The speed limit was ostensibly 60 kph (36 mph), but as we learned from experience, no one drove that speed. Drivers in the powerful Mercedes and BMWs that could climb the grade without downshifting would roar up the hill at 120 kph (over 70 mph). (These people, often members of parliament or government officials, were known locally as members of the MBenzi tribe, even if they drove BMWs.) But in addition to the MBenzis, the grade was always sprinkled with massive, overloaded trucks going 20 kph (12 mph). I later had many chances to drive up the grade and personally experience the excitement and danger! The dual challenges were to not slam into the slow trucks as I came up rapidly from behind and to not get hit in the rear by a fast car as I passed the slow trucks, all the while maneuvering around the sharp curves. Every trip up or down the grade was an adventure, and soon it became our daily commute.

On our second morning, Sunday, we got up late again, still struggling with oppressive jet lag. We had breakfast at 11:30 a.m., so we decided that it was our lunch as well. While I was lounging in the living room with a book, I got another indication of the local similarity with California. As I looked out of the glass French doors, I noticed a large plume of smoke from the forest across the valley. I didn’t panic immediately, but I knew the brush was dry and the thought of California forest fires came to mind. I had observed that we were surrounded by tall eucalyptus trees, and I remembered that they burn easily and very hot. I began thinking about what I would pack if we had to evacuate in a hurry. I went outside to survey the situation. At the base of the huge smoke plume, I could see some low flames in the brush. There was no fire higher up in the trees themselves, so I decided not to get too excited. I would just watch calmly and patiently. I figured that if there was an emergency, someone would warn us.

I went back to my reading but got up periodically to observe the fire. While the smoke plume remained huge, the fire didn’t seem to be moving. After a while, Liz drove by. She was obviously observing the situation as well. I flagged her down and asked if we should be concerned. While visibly showing some concern, Liz said that we shouldn’t worry. If the fire did start moving our way, she felt the fire breaks on their property would stop it before it became threatening. She also indicated that her son Patrick would certainly be the first to raise an alarm since his house would be the first to be in danger, especially considering his thatch roof. Her primary concern seemed to be with the environmental impact that all the smoke was having. She said that the fire was probably started by locals seeking honey from beehives. Evidently, their tactics consist of generating smoke to get the bees to leave their hive so that the honey can be removed without interference. Liz was upset not only with the impact that these methods generate, but also that the honey seekers don’t always put out their fires.

I returned to reading and began to speculate what work would be like when we started in the morning. After two weekend days, we were very content with our surroundings. We felt as if we were on vacation in a small cabin in a California state park. The small stove in the kitchen required a match to light the bottled gas, and there was no dishwasher. There was, however, a clothes washer and dryer. We decided to give them a try. Although the controls on the washer had unfamiliar symbols, we pretty much figured it out. We put in the clothes and the detergent, and when we pushed one of the buttons, it started. Unfortunately, I came back later to find the floor flooded. After investigating, I determined that the drain hose from the washer had come out of the drain pipe and irrigated the floor. I went over to Liz’s house to get a mop and then got up all the water. At least we knew the floor was really clean.

Wendy had been quietly working on her computer in the kitchen, periodically staring out of the window through the steel bars that prevented burglary. At one point she detected a slight shadow and lifted her head to see a vervet monkey calmly sitting on the window ledge outside the bars. He stuck his hand through the bars and reached around a bit, but he couldn’t reach anything of interest. (The bars were configured to prevent nonhuman burglary as well.) After the two stared at each other for