Farewell to Swaziland

Swaziland has a fairly transient expat community …. There seems to be a leaving event of some sort about every other week, so instead of doing the normal braai at someone house, Allie (who is also leaving) and I decided we would move the braai to a remote corner of Swaziland.

We had a fantastic weekend, starting off with helping with Teen Club Christmas party (a youth group for HIV Positive teens).  I volunteered for face painting and became quite adept at drawing snowmen and Christmas trees … but struggles a bit more when there was a craze for South African flags … I’m sure it is one of the most complicated … why does any flag need five colours!

We then headed out into the country side to say at a place called the Rock Lodge, the clue is in the name and it is a fairly basic place built around a rock formation and perched on the edge of a cliff.  An amazing location, once you find it, which we were a bit uncertain about when we were given a hand drawn map to help us get there, with useful instructions such as, take the second track on the left after the concrete posts and then follow the road until you reach the last homestead…. What could possibly go wrong?!  Amazingly we made it without getting too lost.  And had a fun braai in the evening and a walk down to the river in the morning.  I hope the photos give a bit of a flavor of what it was like.

A room with a view!

Weather

I have been very quiet on the blog front, so I thought I would add a couple of things before I leave.  The first one being a subject close to most peoples heart’s in the UK… the Weather!

You may think that I have been enjoying non-stop sunshine since I am in Africa…. If only that was the case.  For my first couple of months it was cold, or more precisely sunny and warm during the day and then dropping in temperature significantly in the evenings.  Which you would think would be manageable, apart from the fact none of the house are built to withstand the cold so during a nice warm sunny day the office or your house would be a good few degrees colder.  I lived in the one coat I brought with me!

It has now warmed up, but summer also brings the rainy season so one day you can have glorious sunshine … 

  …. And then the next day it can look like this when Mbabane is basically in the clouds!

Or you can have absolutely crazy lightening storms,  often with torrential rain, golf ball sized hail stones and hugely windy.  It can be quite surreal, if it looks like a major storm is brewing then things start closing early so people can get home before the storm breaks.  This is not as odd as if first seemed as Swaziland has the highest per capita rate of lightning strikes in the world.  So you really don’t want to be caught in the wrong place during a storm! 

It's the little differences....

Sometimes Swaziland can seem so normal in some aspects and the people you work and interact with so like everyone at home that you forget they come from such a different background.  This has been brought home to me a number of times.  For example, during a meeting I was talking to Dumile who is the National Laboratory Supervisor and Deputy to the Chief of Laboratory services, she is great to work with, very intelligent and capable which lulls you into the assumption that  she’s had a similar background of school and then university to yourself.  Which she has, but with a difference.  We were talking about her home area, and she was explaining where it was and then commented one of the things she always appreciated when she visits now is that she can go by car.  She has not so fond memories of when she was young of having to walk the 10km from the nearest food shops etc with 10kg of mealie (maize) on her head, and usually carrying 5 kg of fruit as well….  

The other occasion recently talking Phumzile who has many jobs, one as a member  Pele Pele (a local drumming and dancing group), then as a driver for a clothes manufacturing company and then a little sideline teaching a few expats drumming once a week…  When they come around they love using one of our computers to access facebook and it so you just assume that they know and have some understanding on how to use things other than the internet.  But when we were talking, and he was explaining he could access facebook on his phone, and then proudly told us he could also access it on a computer at work, as he had access to learn how to use the computer as to develop other skills as well as driving.  Which just took some of the assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d made right out from under me…    I had just assumed that being able to use some aspects of technology implied being able to use it in the other areas.  I really should really know better, as I find myself having to explain what I would consider really basis excel concepts (how to add things together, and put filters on) to people who for Swaziland are quite expert on the computer ….

Teen Club

This weekend I volunteered at Teen Club, which is organized via Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative.  The club is set up for HIV positive youth, ranging from about 8 to 18.  Although, in Swaziland they all look much younger as they are so small due to the high level of malnutrition. It was amazing to be involved, they meet monthly and run a series of workshops on different themes, which vary from helping the teens understand what HIV is, why their medicine is important, things around disclosure of their status (there is still a lot of stigma in Swaziland about being HIV+ even though one in four people are).  This weekend it was about dealing with stress, there were three different workshops which they participate in each lead by a Swazi teen leader who themselves participated in teen club.  In one workshop they discussed what kinds of things may help them deal with stress or increase stress levels and thought about what they could do to increase the things that decreased stress.  In another workshop they tried out different methods to reduce stress such as breathing techniques and meditation techniques.    Then they end each club meeting with a singing along to a song by R Kelly called ‘I am the world’s greatest’ complete with actions to go along with it, it is very sweet.  I will definitely going to try and help out at some more of the meetings…. And hopefully get some photos!

Umhlanga / Reed Dance

I am a little behind myself, but a couple of weeks ago, was the Umhlanga Festival (or the Reed Dance), this is a festival for all the kingdom’s maidens (women who are less than 21 and haven’t had any children).  It goes on for about 4 days, starting on a Thursday, with all the maidens who want to participate being transported to the festival location near the royal enclave in the back of open trucks, which is a bit of an odd sight in the first place.  On the Friday the maidens are told where they are to collect reeds, they aim to collect the longest reeds they can.  The Saturday is a day of preparation and then on Sunday all the maidens present their reeds to the Queen Mother.  This is accompanied by a lot of singing and dancing. The reeds will then be used to repair the royal enclave.  The culmination of the festival is on the Monday when all the maidens dance for the king.

It is quite an impressive sight, all the maidens sing and dance in groups with other girls in their community.  They move around the stadium field singing and dancing.   They are all singing different songs at the same time, so it is quite a cacophony of different sounds and sights.  They all were different forms of colourful traditional wear.  Later in the afternoon the King arrives with his warriors also in traditional dress and after they have watched the dancing for some time they go down into the field to dance and inspect all the maidens and if the king wants he can pick a new wife…. to add to the 13 he currently has!

 The King and his warriors inspecting the maidens

Wildlife

A lovely Sunday afternoon….

I went to my first game park in Swaziland, and it was fantastically low key, on Sunday afternoon we just decided to go to Milwane (it is only about half an hour drive from Mbabane).  We left our cars at the only camp in the park and stumbled across 2 different types of antelope grazing in the camp, monkeys running through and 2 hippos by the side of the lake only about 5 meters from where we standing!  We then for a walk through the park, apparently because there are no big cats it’s safe (although I thought the crocodile we saw could have done some damage if it wanted to).  Anyway we survived and saw some great scenery and antelope, wildebeest, warthogs and the most enormous crocodile I have ever seen.

I’ve uploaded my first set of wildlife photos to bore you with.

Procurement - Swazi Government Style

In classic Swazi style Alison, our Country Director, received an invitation to participate in the Laboratory tender assessment session on a Friday for a meeting scheduled from Tuesday to Friday the next week.  As the current link person to the laboratories this opportunity was quickly delegated to me.  From my questions about the agenda and the process, it was clear that it was going to be a very different procurement process to anyone I have ever run or participated in…. It has been an fairly frustrating four days, and we haven’t finished, I’ve been advised we are needed back Monday and Tuesday next week as well.

All the tenders had been submitted as very weighty tomes (with an original document and 4 copies) and the meeting was run with strict formality, even though everyone in the room knows each other well and works together frequently, there was a chair and the procurement team of two where the ‘secretariat’ to document decisions and confirm the data the decisions were based on.  I would have expected the procurement team to have reviewed, assessed all the tenders and then provided a summary of it to the assessment team to review and check some original documentation to confirm.  In fact the opposite was the case, the assessment team was expected to review all of the tenders to confirm the information and criteria were met…. Which sounds kind of fine, until you have to check supplier by supplier (all 21 of them) that the 92 pages of pricing proposals have been correctly transcribed into excel and if they have quoted for the correct pack size.  Then to review it all again to confirm they have authorization from all the manufactures they quote for to sell their material.  I had suggested if we were going to eliminate the ones without manufacturing authorization we may want to do it the other way around, but it wasn’t supported.  Painful is the only word for it, especially as 3 of us out of the 9 people in the room generated 75% of the output and the rest spent a lot of time talking about how hard work it was!

I have been commenting and capturing improvement suggestions as I go through, I just hope some of them will be taken on board,  I think they are coming around to my number one suggestion of a pre-screening so they have a more reasonable number of suppliers to assess at this level of detail.   Also, it seems as though the laboratory people are valuing the learning experience of going through the information in detail.  And I hope they remember next year the importance of clearly defining assessment criteria up front and being very clear regarding the documentation you want suppliers to provide to enable you to do the assessment.   Hopefully it will be downhill from here!

PS … I have been a bit late posting this, and it has not been downhill, it’s going to take longer than the additional 2 days they planned for at the end of last week…