Reflections on Culture from Swaziland

Hyomi puppy

Living in a different culture provides an opportunity to see life from a different perspective. The following are excerpts from Hyomi’s Tumblr blog as she continues her service in the Peace Corps. Her training period is finished and she begins to settle in to her permanent host residence during weeks 10 through 11 last fall.

Another Episode of Reverse Culture Shock

This first comment was made after watching SATC 2 one evening after a busy day.

” I found myself absolutely disgusted by the decadence of her lifestyle. I am now much more mindful of wastefulness and superfluousness, and experience minor culture shock when I watch movies from home, depicting affluence, comfort, and convenience. These things are virtual strangers to me now.”

She recounts the enormous effort it takes to go shopping for home supplies, food and materials to create her “living space”. Basically she was given and empty hut and had a minimal stipend which she frugally used to buy a bed, a mini fridge, shelving and paint supplies. On the way home from a laborious shopping trip she meets the Prime Minister.

“The day was slightly brightened by our chance encounter with the Prime Minister—ok, so maybe it wasn’t exactly chance, we did drive by the store he owns and decide to buy something randomly so we’d have an excuse to talk to him—BUT, he was delighted to chat with us, since he really likes Peace Corps volunteers and did his undergraduate studies in Wisconsin. When I told him I was from New Hampshire, he told me he had been up there for elections one year and really liked the state. One of the few times I could proudly vouch for my state.”

“I began Operation “Hyom-ify” in earnest the next day, spending hours painting my room, using yellow, a tiny tint bottle of red to mix into orange, and black. The walls are now adorned with the scene of an African savanna, silhouetted by a looming sunrise. I included giraffes, a roaring lion, elephants, birds, a zebra, and an antelope being chased by a cheetah. Next, I painted a giant acacia tree on the wall above my kitchen/pantry area, marked with a small red heart on the trunk. My final touch was an inscription above the door which read, “Konkhe Kuyenteka Ku Nkulunkulu.” This loosely translates to “With God, all things are possible.” This phrase will serve as my daily encouragement, particularly on those days when I begin to doubt my use or effectiveness here. It’s good to know that God always has my back. :-)”

The culture may not be logical

“I cannot expect that logic or a focus on efficiency will necessarily play a role in people’s actions.I was asked to go with my host sister on not one, not two, but FIVE roundtrips to the neighborhood twenty minutes away to run a variety of errands. For a moment, I questioned why people couldn’t get their act together and make a list of all the things they needed to accomplish in the neighborhood in the beginning, so we could run all the errands in one fell swoop. I also had to catch myself when I wondered why it made more sense to them to yell for my host sister and make her run back a quarter of a mile, rather than just picking up their phone and calling her when they forgot to tell her something.”

“But then, I realized I was trying to rationalize with my own logic, and logic, as I’ve mentioned, does not always apply. In my book, we should not have had to go back a number of different times to buy food, buy drinks, borrow a phone charger, try to buy a prepaid chicken, come back without the chicken upon denial from the seller that the church had prepaid for the chicken, and then go back again to implore the chicken seller to give us the chicken on credit and promise to pay for it later on behalf of the church(while adding in that my sister and I were tired and had walked a TON already that day).”

“Oh whoops, sorry, did I forget to mention that there was apparently a CAR we could have used to run these errands, but no one had bothered to tell us when they sent us off to do these things? I was absolutely exasperated by the end of this circus, but was able to laugh about it later. Definitely not the way I would have gone about my to-do list, but this is Swaziland, and I’m going to have to learn to adapt. Such is life.”

Despite the limitations of her circumstances Hyomi is a person with incredible ambition as is evidenced by her to do lists:

PERSONAL GOALS: Hyomi puppy2

1)Raise a puppy (this number was initially two, but has since been reduced per the notification that one of the ones I was going to pick up had died…sad)

2)Learn guitar

3)Create a compost pile and grow a spice garden

4)Complete the 60 day Insanity workout challenge with Shaun T

5)Study for the GREs and take the exam in Johannesburg

6)Apply to grad school and get accepted into a program/fellowship

7)Teach Tae Kwon Do to my host siblings

8)Train and compete with the Swazi National Tae Kwon Do team

9)Study Japanese and Korean

10)Learn more siSwati

11)Learn more sign language from my deaf brother

12)Tutor my host siblings and raise their grades (subjects they are currently failing, sadly. Most of their grades are D’s or below..they even have E’s over here)

13)Learn a Swazi traditional dance (and go see the Reed dance next year)

14)Bake a cake in a frying pan(and I don’t mean pancake, I mean full-fledged pastry)

15)read 3-5 books every month (goal of at least 100 books over two years)

16)Travel to: Capetown and Durban in South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Victoria Falls, and Namibia (with what money, you ask? I wish I had an answer for you…)

PUBLIC GOALS:

1.)Create a martial arts based life skills program (teaching kids the tenets of martial arts, including self-control, respect for themselves and others, and translating those values out into their daily lives. This program would tie in HIV/AIDS education and awareness in its curriculum)

2.)An HIV/AIDS youth-led education program through the performing arts

3.)Establish a library in the primary school, and a reading program

4.)Teach life skills in classroom

5.)Build a community garden

6.)A tutoring and mentoring partnership program that would bring together college, high school, and primary school students

7.)Create a Junior Achievement program at the high school

8.)Create a library at the high school, and a reading program

9.)Motivational learning programs

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Author:Hyomi Carty

A Tufts University graduate who is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Swaziland, Africa.

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