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

After the tour of the village, we watched a performance of Swazi dancing and singing. The dancing was more athletic than most traditional dancing Wendy and I had seen in other countries, and the singing had great rhythm with multipart harmony. The performance wrapped up with a traditional rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was written by a Swazi.

Later Saturday evening, we observed a slice of current culture in Swaziland. We had been invited to go with people from our office to a local country club for dinner and a wine auction. We had no idea what to expect, but we looked forward to the opportunity to socialize with our coworkers. The country club was some distance away from Mbabane in a more rural area. Strangely, it was located adjacent to a very large canning plant for fruits and vegetables. We pulled into the dirt parking area and walked with our friends to the clubhouse.

Immediately, when we entered the clubhouse, I felt as if I was in an Elks Lodge or an American Legion Hall in a rural United States community. The floor was concrete; the ceiling was acoustical tile with commercial-style fluorescent lights. There was a fireplace that gave some ambiance, but it was overwhelmed by the rest of the slightly down-at-the-heels décor. The room was filled with tables covered with paper tablecloths and surrounded by folding chairs. The decorating committee had actually done a very nice job dressing up these tables with attractive centerpieces made of local fruits and accessories. We arrived early, so we went into the bar where a self-serve wine tasting was in progress.

The bar had similar décor except the ceiling was lower, presumably to make it cozier. We sampled a number of wines from South Africa as more people arrived. When we went back into the main dining hall, most of the tables were full, and we were immediately struck by the sea of whiteness. To put this into perspective, when walking around Mbabane, the population we saw was over 99 percent nonwhite. In fact, my experience had been that, walking down the street, white people had a tendency to stare at each other with the implied questions of, “I wonder who that is and why they are here?” At the country club dinner, the couple of mixed race background at our table had the only nonwhite faces in the room.

With further observation, the crowd seemed to fit the American Legion theme. There was a lot of white hair as well as white skin. Most people were in their fifties through seventies and looked like farmers or perhaps small businessmen from a rural community. We were in our late fifties as well, but the idea that “sixty is the new forty” hadn’t made it to Swaziland. Some of the women were nicely dressed and obviously paid attention to their appearance. However, a lot of the men had significant bellies that projected well beyond their belts. I did see two younger men, perhaps in their thirties, apparently trying to dress cool and sophisticated. They both had on informal jackets over wide open-collar shirts with pushed-up sleeves. I think the idea was to simulate the Miami Vice look, but it came off as a rumpled imitation of a style that had long been out of fashion.

My thoughts were obviously biased by the sophisticated Silicon Valley environment we had left just two weeks earlier. However, I couldn’t help but think that these people were probably Afrikaners who had migrated from South Africa with all the negative implications from the history of apartheid. Of course, when looking at me, I think most people in Swaziland guessed that I was from South Africa as well. So we all have our prejudices. I was told at a later date that most of the whites in Swaziland aren’t actually from South Africa but instead came directly from Europe. All of these people whom I had observed were probably very nice, hardworking individuals who had contributed to the economy of Swaziland. I just couldn’t ignore the stark contrasts with both Silicon Valley and the general population of Swaziland, and I felt very uncomfortable.

After we sat down at our table, the auctioneer for the evening took the podium. He was an elderly gentleman, portly, and dressed in a white shirt with a string tie. He took command and told us that the wine auction would be completed before dinner was served. We had mild trepidation since the only food on the table was bread and a small cheese plate garnished with a few vegetables. We had no idea! There were one hundred lots of wine that were auctioned off, and it took forever. I thought people would start passing out from hunger, but the auctioneer went on and on. Finally, after fifty lots, he took a break, but this only meant that dinner was further postponed. Dinner was served after 10:00 p.m. When we finally got to eat it, it was a pleasant pedestrian meal, well-done beef with mixed vegetables, potatoes, and a decent dessert.

During dinner, I got the opportunity to talk to the husband of one of my coworkers. He had a position of responsibility with the largest local bank. As we talked about the older age of the crowd at the auction, he said that seeing this demographic had become more common in the native Swazi population as well. The cause was the AIDS epidemic that was still killing off a huge proportion of Swaziland’s young adults despite the omnipresent cautionary billboards and readily available condoms. His bank had encouraged many of their retired employees to come back to work because so many of their productive younger workers had been lost to AIDS. From a larger perspective, there was serious concern that the Swazi population was evolving to a distribution with many children and adolescents (including many orphans) and a number of people over forty, but with a “hole” in the twenty to forty age group. The implications for both the business community and the society in general were ominous.

Although the AIDS epidemic threatened the country long-term, the weather had a more immediate impact on us. In general, the weather since we arrived had been very pleasant. It had been similar to northern California weather in the early spring with daytime temperatures usually approaching 70°Fahrenheit. The nights had been cool, around 50°F, which isn’t bad if your house is centrally heated, but ours wasn’t. Our cottage had small, relatively ineffective space heaters in two of the rooms. They definitely didn’t heat the house and really didn’t seem to make a difference if they were on or off. So the nights were very cold. Although we were used to having our own sleeping space in a queen-sized bed at home, compressing ourselves together in a double bed under a sheet, a blanket, the bed cover, and a quilt seemed a reasonable compromise to keep warm.

After a few weeks, the weather began to get a little warmer. Not a lot, but it was noticeable. It had definitely gotten just a little warmer at night, and on some mornings, I hadn’t worn a jacket to work. It had just turned to August, which is the equivalent of February in northern California. And like California in February, some days were actually warm if you went out in the midday and soaked in the radiant heat from the sun.

With the relatively mild and temperate weather lulling us into a sense of pleasant complacency, we weren’t prepared for the occasional intensity of Swaziland’s storms. Then we had two nights of fury. The first night, we had an amazing storm. It wasn’t a hurricane, but it came close. At dusk, the wind came up. I had never experienced wind so strong without rain. It was intense. I don’t think the winds got over seventy-five miles per hour, but I imagine it blew at fifty or sixty and carried on for several hours. Then it started to rain. The most intense rainstorms I ever experienced had always been in the tropics, but this was just as severe. The intense rain and wind continued for several hours. We could hardly sleep. Throughout the night, Wendy and I kept thinking about the forest of eucalyptus trees right next to our cottage, hoping they wouldn’t fall on us. Later, the rain stopped, but the wind kept up all night long. The early morning was calm and gave way to a beautiful day with perfectly clear air and not a cloud in the sky. Our view over the Ezulwini Valley was beautiful. We understood why it is called the Valley of Heaven.

With the previous night’s weather behind us, we went to the office. Unfortunately, we heard from the business advisor in charge of horticulture that one of her clients had his crop of baby vegetables wiped out by a hailstorm. She had visited his farm and taken pictures. The hail had been severe and had accumulated so much that it looked like snow on the ground. The localized hail didn’t cause widespread devastation, but it had totally destroyed our farmer’s crop, causing a twenty-thousand-dollar loss. Crop insurance was so expensive in Swaziland that it essentially didn’t exist, so individual farmers paid the price for the whims of nature.

The rest of our day was uneventful, and Wendy and I left the office around 6:00 p.m. The wind picked up, just like the night before. As we drove the few miles to our cottage, we began to notice that the street and traffic lights were out. We hoped that it didn’t affect our house but expected to come home to darkness. Although all the way home there were no lights on the main road, as soon as we turned into the Emafini complex, we could see glimmers of light in the distance. We had hope. As we drove over the top of the hill on our dirt and rock road, we could see the exterior lights from our cottage. We were happy. And when we scrambled into the house and closed the door, we felt we had achieved our refuge.

I began to cook dinner (while we were in Africa, I did all the cooking as Wendy created a website to keep our friends and family up to date on all of our activities) while Wendy packed for her planned trip to Johannesburg with Atiba and Leslie in the morning. The wind was really blowing again. No rain, but tree branches were being broken and blown about. And the constant roar was like a wind tunnel. The lights flickered. The television was intermittent as the reception of the satellite dish was interrupted. Just as I finished cooking and was putting dinner on the plates, the power died for good. We had dinner by candlelight. Actually, we had the modern version of dinner by candlelight and LED. Our son, who is an outdoor equipment aficionado, had convinced us to pack battery-operated LED headlamps. So we used these with the candles for dinner. How very strange; the eerie, sterile, high-tech beams from LEDs combined with the primitive, warm glow of candles. The novelty of the candlelight dinner wore off quickly.

The previous night, the winds weren’t hurricane force, but this night, I’m sure they were. They roared all night, making it impossible to stay asleep. As the wind ripped branches off the trees and smashed them against the windows, it sounded as if the panes would shatter. I worried as to what I would do if they did. Periodically, I was able to doze off until a particularly loud crash against a window would wake me again. Luckily, the windows never broke, and we survived the night.

In the morning