my name is “temba”

Saneebonanee! (or hello!) friends!

I’m in Swaziland, Africa right now… crazy right? The village we are living in is called Timbutini which literally translates to “too many goats” and the name couldn’t be more fitting. They are all over the place. On our homestead there are goats, cows, hens and about 5 too many roosters. The roosters are horrible. When you think rooster you think about them crowing when the sun comes up. Not ours. They are blind or something cause they regularly start crowing between 2:30am-3:30am and keep going till it’s light outside. Maybe they are fortune telling crows or something. At night we throw rocks at them to try to throw off their sleeping schedule but it hasn’t worked. Actually the past two mornings they’ve been crowing like crazy and I went outside to run them off and 3 of them were outside our window crowing. We have a mutual hate for each other. They are worse than an alarm clock.

Life here in Swazi is so basic. We have big metal water tanks that get filled semi regularly and are connected to our gutter so rain water can flow into them. That is our main source of water outside of our bottled drinking water. We use the tank water to clean, wash our clothes (by hand!) , take bucket showers. What is this bucket shower you ask..? You fill up a bucket with water, go into this sheet metal privacy deal and cup water over yourself, soap up, then rinse. That my friends is good living. I love the bucket showers! Just like I would at home, I take long bucket showers. They are great! We also have 3 out houses (not your typical port-o-pots) to do business on. I use a specific one that doesn’t have a door and semi faces the dirt road. You know, it kind of makes things more exciting. First time I went to sit down I thought I about to fall through down into the poo. I sit gingerly now.

We have electricity a good majority of the time but we don’t really need it other than to power our frig and lights once it gets dark. I’m sure our electric bill would make you envious. As you can guess we don’t have the Internet. The closest Internet to us is about a 20 minute drive into a town called Manzini. I guess Internet would cost about 100 bucks a month and considering that 70% of the population makes less than a dollar a day…yeah. Not even our local chief has Internet. Crazy thing is that everyone and seriously everyone has a cell phone! Even our Gogo Shangway (grandma) who is 70 years old and lives this super basic, chicken killing life, has a cell phone… I can ‘t make any sense of it. She is really fun though.

Life here is a great though. The terms “hurry up and wait” and “swazi time” are so true of swazi. If something starts at 10am it might start at 11am. Regularly I feel like we are in a hurry to get somewhere then stand around for a good 15 minutes. You’d think it would stress you out but you get used to it and the change of pace has been refreshing for me. Life is slow and laid back. There is no real hurry for anything and honestly with the crap dirt roads you couldn’t go anywhere fast if you wanted to. (fun story: there are always cows in the road so one of the local missionaries named Dennis, made up a game called “punch! that! cow!” in which you try to punch the cow from your car. Ha! We’ve not been successful yet but before I leave I will have “punched that cow!”

Lets get to the good stuff.

We’ve started spending time at the “care centers” where many orphans and children spend time. There are three that we’ll be spending a majority of our time at. The children have big beautiful smiles and are always filled with joy. Kids that have nothing, sometimes no family, nothing to call their own and they have joy. Seems like we have messed up somewhere along the way doesn’t it? We have so much but lack joy a lot of the time. Their joy comes from love which is from God.

 Ryan