Small Linguistic Victories

Very exciting accomplishment today.  I successfully pronounced the name of the Swazi woman who works with us.

Her name is spelled Gcinaphi, and it's pronounced gi-na-pee with a hard "g", with a Swazi twist.  The "gc" at the very beginning is accompanied by short click with your tongue against your front teeth.  I'm not sure how to articulate the sound in writing, but it's sort of a kissing-type sound or a tsk-tsk sound.  (Potter and Rouss, you'll know the sound I mean).  So try pronouncing a hard G sound while at the same time clicking your tongue against the front of your teeth.  It's as hard to do as it is to explain.

Bonus Wikipedia explanation:

The easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with a single pipe, ǀ. They are all sharp (high-pitched) squeaky sounds made by sucking on the front teeth. A simple dental click is used in English to express pity or to shame someone, and sometimes to call an animal, and is written tsk! in American English, or tut-tut! in British English.

Next will be learning how to say it well enough that I can use it in a sentence without completely losing my train of thought trying to concentrate on the pronunciation.

De-bugging the Airplane

South African Law says that all flights inbound from certain countries must spray the cabin for bugs before takeoff to (I suppose) prevent the transmission of insect-borne diseases across borders.  In practice this means that a flight attendant walks down the aisle after everyone is seated with an aerosol can (or 3, as was the case in Nairobi) spouting some kind of bug killing spray that smells like Febreze.  On today's flight there was no air circulating through the small plane at the time, so it hung in the air for about 5 minutes.  Pretty disgusting.  It is nice that they do you the favor of first saying "We are about to spray the cabin, it will not hurt you but you may cover your nose and mouth if you wish" or something to that effect.  

I guess it's in keeping with South Africa's policy on things like Yellow Fever, as well, where you hear nightmare stories of travelers from East West Africa unable to prove their vaccination history and being quarantined for upwards of 10 days.  I haven't been asked for it, but I keep my yellow proof-of-vaccination card in my passport just in case.

Travel update: I've almost made it back from Gaborone, but have a quick stop in Johannesburg tonight since it's not possible to fly direct from Gaborone to Manzini (the Swazi airport).  Additionally, you can't get off of one flight and get on another without waiting several hours or overnight since flights to/from Gaborone and Manzini leave Johannesburg at the same time.  Apparently it's not a popular route.

I'll post some first thoughts on Gaborone shortly, it's a big city compared to all of Swaziland but I didn't get much time to explore (keeping with a trend).  

World Cup Fever

Killing a few hours in the Johannesburg airport this morning, where World Cup 2010 excitement has reached near-fever pitch.  Some examples:
- The one radio station we could listen to on the way from Mbabane (radio in the car receives frequencies from 60.something to 89.0, and the frequencies in SA are the same as in the US) played the K'naan world cup song 5 times in the 4-hour drive.
- Several South African Airways planes are painted with soccer balls and the World Cup Logo.
- Dozens of people are walking around the airport with Vuvuzelas painted with South African colors -- side note, if you haven't heard a vuvuzela, check out here why FIFA almost tried to ban them from this year's event.
-Oversized soccer balls hanging from the ceiling in dozens of places.
-Billboards, signs, ads, etc. from Visa, telling us "Go Fans" whatever that means.  They have purchased ad space on the entire terminal, I think.  The most prominent flag next to the South African flag is the American flag.  


Still have to get some tickets, though the current plan is to watch the US play Slovenia and then catch another game or two in Nelspruit, which is only about 2 hours from Mbabane.  New Zealand plays Italy there, which seems like it would be fun. The Nelspruit stadium is painted like a Zebra, since it's the closest stadium to Kruger National Park.  Funny stuff.


For those of you who haven't seen/heard the K'Naan video, it's pretty catchy:

Rural Swaziland

I had a chance this weekend to see a more rural part of the country. We drove up to "the Gap" -- a spot in the Nkomati river where the water disappears underneath about 50 feet of rock and reappears quite a distance away -- and it didn't take long to leave the paved roads behind.  The roads alone were a bit treacherous, and we had to stop several times for cows and goats to get out of the way.

I still haven't seen a Zebra. Soon, I hope.

Me, near "the Gap"

More Pictures and a Lead on Housing

In keeping with my goal of posting less content, more often, I thought I'd add a few more pictures to the mix and answer a few common questions.

I might have mentioned once or twice that this place is rural. It really is. There are a few main streets that constitute the "city" and I'll post some pictures soon (once I take them), but these next two pictures more accurately capture the overall Swazi scene. It's not always this gray -- today it was 70 degrees and completely clear -- but you get the idea. The winter here is the dry season, so rainy gray days should become much less common. It is definitely starting to feel like fall and get cold at night--after dinner tonight we could see our breath frozen in the air. The swazis are already wearing their thick jackets, even during the day, which is pretty funny.

A view from "Pine Valley," a scenic, if a bit remote, part of Mbabane.

This house is cooler looking than the picture makes it out to be but it provides a sense of how isolated the places in Pine Valley are. Once you get out a few kilometers* past town the houses become very far apart and most/all have great views. I don't expect to live out this far from town, even though it's only a 15-minute drive to work and a few of my colleagues do live in these parts.

Speaking of living, a common question: Do I have a permanent place to live yet? Answer: No, not yet. I'm still living at the cushy hotel with a pool and a tennis court, and will be here for another week at least. The current plan is to find a place with a colleague who is also brand new to the country, in a two- or three-bedroom house depending on what we find. We have a lead on a great place that will be open in late June, which we may take if we can find something temporary (and less expensive) than the hotel we're in now. I don't expect it will be a problem, there's a lot of transient people here, especially in the expat community.

I mentioned that I hiked a mountain when I first arrived. This is the mountain/rock, called Sibebe (si-bay-bay) and is one of the largest single deposits of granite in the world, apparently. We climbed up the face about a third of the way from the right side of this photo, and it was a bit of work at times to keep from tumbling backward due to the steepness. The top has at least one cave that was fortified by original Swazi tribes, which was really cool to see. Apparently there are many thousand-year-old cave drawings in the country which will be interesting to explore.

Finally, this is a relatively unrelated picture from my hotel room in Nairobi, notable for the new-to-me mosquito net that hangs over the bed. I'd never seen anything like it before, but this is a very effective malaria prevention tool. Also it's a very effective fishing net, which is what a sizeable percentage of the netting that is donated to rural parts of the country becomes. In Nairobi and western Swaziland there really isn't much/any malaria to speak of, but the nets make western tourists feel better, I suppose. Right now in Mbabane it's mostly too cold for mosquitos to survive the night, so malaria at this time of year is almost unheard of.

Sala khale (goodbye),

Garrett

*I'm trying desperately to comprehend the metric system and learn 24-hour time--too bad I didn't pay attention to Scott's Anglophile expressions more closely... Thank god no one here uses the term "fortnight"

First Pictures

One of my major misconceptions before arriving in Africa was that the continent would be so different from the rest of my experience that I'd barely recognize it as being on the same planet.  I think expected to step off the plane in Johannesburg or Matsapha and realize "Aha!  I am absolutely in Africa and I can tell because the grass here is blue."  Maybe not quite that extreme, but I think I was expecting something closer to Mars than Colorado.

I was wrong -- the terrain is different in some ways, the trees and bugs and so on are are different, but I can still recognize trees as trees and bugs as bugs.   Swaziland itself reminds me of a hybrid of Ireland--many hills, fairly green but brown in the winter--and New Zealand -- rocks everywhere, cows on the side of the road not fenced in, etc.

Without further ado, here's some pictures to illustrate that the grass is not, in fact, blue.  

If it's possible, this picture doesn't do justice to the airport.  I landed at night this week and could only get a poor picture of the sign in the time I had.  It still makes me laugh, for some reason.

The view from the door of my room at the Brakenhill Lodge where I'm staying in for my first couple of weeks.


At the top of some hill, looking down on Mbabane.

Note: My new colleague Joe and I did a driving tour of Mbabane today.  He's been here a week longer than I have, so we spent some time driving around the hills, getting a little bit lost and taking some pictures.  I don't know where we took this, exactly, so "some hill" will have to suffice.  It was only about 10 minutes drive from town.

Still on "some hill" Same spot, this is to prove to my mother that I'm alive.

More to come!

Two Days on the Job

I've officially started my job.  As an added bonus, I've begun to figure out a bit more about what I'll actually be doing, though after two days of 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. meetings I'm not sure I have the mental capacity to write about it coherently.*

The basics: I'm working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative (henceforth referred to as "CHAI"), which is under the umbrella of the Clinton Foundation.  In particular, I'm working as part of the team in Swaziland dedicated to improving health outcomes in the country.  Specifically, I'll be focused on helping the Ministry of Health and related organizations improve their ability to forecast for drugs and other necessities for combatting HIV/AIDS.  Swaziland has been devastated by the disease, and has the highest per-capita infection rate of any country in the world.  Part of my job will also be in Gaborone, Botswana, where I'll have a similar role in helping in the procurement process.

I've spent the last two days at a conference hosted by CHAI's global pediatrics team.  That team has focused for the last several years on pediatric HIV prevention and treatment generally, but specifically on managing a donation of "commodities" -- anti-retroviral drugs, testing equipment, etc. -- from UNITAID (pronounced unit-aid).  Depending on the country, CHAI plays a greater or lesser role in the procurement and delivery process, nearly always forecasting and ordering.  I'm here because I'll have a role in helping manage that process in Swaziland and Botswana.


In the sessions I've had a chance to meet a bunch of people that work in or with countries all over the continent.  I'm  struck by how much these people care about what they do.  Each person takes every new case of pediatric HIV/AIDS personally.  They (we?) feel completely responsible for failures at a country level and hold themselves to an extremely high standard.  It was really interesting to sit in a room full of people so clearly dedicated to their jobs, or at least dedicated to the mission.

Unfortunately I haven't had much of a chance to see Nairobi, we're staying at a hotel about halfway between the airport and the city and have been here in meetings most of the time.  We did drive into the city for dinner last night, which gave me my first taste of non-Western driving.  I am fairly certain it was a three-lane highway/main road, but cars were packed about 5-wide and barely crawling along.  It took us an hour and 45 minutes to drive to dinner, and about 15 minutes to drive back.  Switching lanes entailed cutting hard right or left into someone and hoping they'd give way, and our bus driver's strategy was to switch lanes as much as possible.  It was awesome.  It might have been unsafe had we not been driving <3 mph (~5 kph--I'm trying to convert so I can understand things around here) the whole time.
The epic drive did allow for the good-ish food trend to continue.   The Thai food we had for dinner last night was almost all good, one dish better than good, and one dish worse.  I'm staying tomorrow to work with my new boss all day tomorrow, but hope to find some time to explore the city and find our way to some Indian food, for which the city is famous.


I'll stop there, having long overshot the 20-minute time limit I'd set for myself, but will finish with a question to people more knowledgeable (and with better access to Google) than me:  Why does Tusker Lager (the beer of choice here in Nairobi) have sugar as an added ingredient?  It doesn't taste particularly sweet, and it's definitely not Belgian-style, so I'll pose that to someone who knows more about these things than I do and hopefully find an answer.


Kwaherini,
Garrett


*As part of my blogging/communicating plan, I'm trying to hold myself to writing more often at a lower quality standard than I'm usually comfortable with.  Please tell me if I'm boring, but hopefully you can overlook the bad writing.

On The Ground

35 hours after leaving Boston, I made it to Swaziland!  I have a lot of early thoughts, not much time to write right now en route to Nairobi, but I've captured a few below.  Pictures to come, I haven't had a chance to break out the camera yet.  I do have some of my farewell tour, including the bonus 12-hour London stop, which I'll try to post shortly as well (for practice if nothing else).  


Some thoughts, conclusions subject to revision once I get a chance to spend more than 12 hours in the country:
- American Airlines had the worst food I've tasted in a long time.  It was indistinguishable mush, but apparently it was beef.  South African airways apparently had good wine, but I was asleep before takeoff and didn't get a chance to try it.  Thankfully, I was able to sleep for most of the 11-hour flight from London to Johannesburg.  
- I have never seen a smaller airport in my life than the one in Manzini, Swaziland.  Ever.  And it says "Welcome to the Kingdom of Swaziland" on the front, which I found funny for some reason.  I'll get a picture if I fly back in there later this week.  It had one room, maybe two or three others that I didn't see.  They didn't blink when I told them I was staying for 1 day (true-ish, since I'm going to Nairobi today) but was carrying three suitcases, a backpack and a laptop bag with me.

- Mbabane (pronounced alternately "ba-ban-ee" or um-ba-bahn" depending on who is speaking) is absolutely tiny. I'm talking don't blink while driving through or you'll miss it, tiny.  Everyone lives on a hill overlooking some scenic view or other, no one lives in the city center that I can tell.  It feels even smaller than Concord, NH, even though I don't think it actually is.

- The food is respectable, possibly even good.  I had two meals in Swaziland yesterday, and both were good.  One was a panini and one was a pasta dish with chorizo.  Both were tasty.  And pretty cheap, ~10USD for dinner, and 5 USD for breakfast.

- The currency is the Emalangeni, and it trades at about 7 to the dollar.  7 is a terribly difficult number to use in division, but I expect I'll get better at it.

- I will probably be able to go to the World Cup pretty easily, if not cheaply.  Will investigate later this week.

- I went on a hike yesterday just after I arrived.  A "rock" called Sibebe.  Described as a "little walk" it turned out to be a three hour hike up a rock face and down through a valley.  It looked like it would have been fun to rock climb/boulder in some parts.  There seem to be some pictures here: http://www.sibebe.co.sz/gallery.html

Now I'm off to Nairobi for four days to meet with the global pediatric HIV/AIDS team and learn a little about what I'll actually be doing for work.  I expect it will be a firehose of information, but I'll try to retain some of it, at least.


More to come.   I'm excited to be here, the place seems interesting with a lot to explore and I expect to have some interesting stories to tell.

Garrett