N’ya pila.

In August I was blessed to spend a week in Swaziland with The Story. Prior to taking the team there I had made a trip to Swaziland to sort details and converse with the community organization leader about what activities this team could be involved in. Together we came up with a day by day agenda. By the time I arrived, a month later with team in tow, everything had changed. T.I.A. (This is Africa)

Instead of Home Based Care we spent the first few days with a group of young, vulnerable orphan girls. It happened to be the time of year for the reed dance—an annual country-wide celebration performed by thousands of the countries young, bare-breasted girls—where the Swazi king more often than not chooses another wife. We were there just a week prior to the celebration and it seemed that the whole country was in a flurry of activity. Even school was interrupted. So this community organization decided to take the opportunity to run a camp for young girls. The camp consisted of devotional times and singing, games, talks about their rights, abuse, and entrepreneurial skills workshops for the older girls.

One young man travelled down from a Swazi city, Mbabane, to run an entrepreneurial skills workshop like he had done so many other times to rural communities across Swaziland. I thought to myself that this guy had a pretty good head on his shoulders, being only 23 and devoting his time to such a noble cause. He sat beside me on the drive back up to Mbabane and we started to chat about life. At one point he shared with me that he wanted to wait at least another 5 years before getting married. "That makes sense, in a culture where the elders question you if you don't have children immediately after getting married," I said, "I could see why you would want to wait another 5 years." He laughed.

"No, I don't want to get married because I don't want a wife to question me each time I am out late at night—when in truth I am only out with friends," he said. Now this kind of talk wasn't so foreign to me. I had heard many other African men—and women—tell me that it was not acceptable for a wife to ask her husband where he was. He continued, "No, if I wanted to have children I should have started..." I could see him calculating something in his head, "2 or 3 years ago. You know the life expectancy in Swaziland has dropped down to 37 years?" This made me sit up—this I had never heard before: a man, such a young man, just 23 years, so matter-of-factly accepting his impending death, which would come to him for no reason other than the fact that he was born in Swaziland. It was such a real moment: to be sitting next to someone whom I will most likely outlive by double his lifetime—just because I was born in Canada, and he elsewhere.

The conversation got a little weirder after that. He started talking about how abstaining till he was married was too difficult but marriage now to one woman would be more difficult and that the only way to go was to have multiple wives. And his rationale for this was...blah, blah.

In a land where when you ask someone a simple "How are you doing?" they reply with: "N'ya pila": "I'm alive," what else should I have expected?

Comments

[Crystal]

What a tragic reality.
Thanks for writing this.