Pre-departure from Paris
Before coming to Swaziland, I had pictured a country in misery – dry dirt roads with shacks that house worn out bodies drawn thin from disease, from AIDS. Swaziland has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. A startling 40 % of adults are HIV positive and the average life expectancy has now dropped to 39 years. Some reports calculate a swazi population all under the age of 30 by 2025. The grand parents who are now taking care of the AIDS orphans will have died from disease or old age and the parents that are still alive today will likely also have succumbed to AIDS by that time. The AIDS rate was one of two facts I knew about Swaziland, that and Swaziland is a Kingdom surrounded almost entirely by South Africa. (And with South Africa I think of apartheid.) It is with these two images floating in my head that I decided to cut short by two weeks my summer holiday of eating pastries and doing yoga in Paris. It was really a crazy decision at the time because I honestly expected the face of death and orphans to greet me at my plane. I knew very little about Swaziland. All I knew were the facts and statistics that popped into my browser after I typed in “Swaziland” into Google. What I have found in my short time here is a country filled with fields of sugar canes that roll into gentle mountains that glow purple and orange in the sunset; the sweet singing of “go-go” (siSwati for grandmother) as she plates mountain grass into long continuous strands; a tranquility that comes from being surrounded by land that extends and extends uninterrupted.