Swaziland. I'm not exactly sure how to describe this beautiful country I am now living in. I am struggling greatly in how to share this culture and what I am seeing gracefully, without condemnation, yet still telling the hard truth.
It's funny how my last blog was titled through a lens of life, because now I am honestly living in a culture of death. No matter how many different ways I look at it I can't seem to see through a lens of life: the people here are wonderful, but the bondage from cultural traditions, demonic ignorance, and comfortable passivity is literally killing this nation. AIDS is spreading so rampantly that by 2050 this nation is predicted not to exist. There are over one million people living in Swaziland and in less than 40 years that number will be zero, unless something changes.
I can't figure out how to share honestly without coming across as too harsh: so I'm just going to give a voice to the oppressed. The stories I'm about to share don't have one name, but a generations. I'm taking cultural facts and personifying them, so that the body of Christ will be able to better fight for those in bondage.
I am a child of Swaziland. I am 4 years old, and most days I go to bed hungry. Not because my family doesn't have enough to eat, but because I am not deemed valuable enough for food. We have one meal a day, my father eats first with a heaping portion. He will not eat unless my mother serves it to him, she then eats the scraps of his plate, and I get some if there are any left overs. At school I wrestle around with other children, because in my small dirt home my whole family sleeps in the same room and I have witnessed sex since I can remember. My home is not a safe place for me: my dad doesn't work because of the economy and he spends most days drinking at home with his buddies. A lot of people believe that having sex with a virgin, the younger the purer, with heal them from AIDS. The Baylor medical clinic's thousands of patients are all children with AIDS: most of us didn't get it passed down from our mothers at birth. We don't talk about this to the outside world, it is just our culture and what the witch doctors tell us is true, its the way it has always been.
I am a teenager of Swaziland. I am a 14 year old female. I must wear a skirt of at least knee length and dress conservatively every day to be modest . Even so, if I am walking down the street and an older man sees me and needs to relieve himself he can do so freely, without my permission. As a man, he has superiority and dominion over the woman of the nation. The police and authority's are corrupt and turn a blind eye even if I were to report it.
I am a mother of Swaziland. I have three children and I live at home with my parents. I had my first child at 18 with a man I knew I wouldn't marry, but it's a rite of passage into adulthood. My other two children are from the man I call my husband. We have been unable to live together yet because the marriage process takes years. He owes my parents 18 cows for my dowry, and until he pays, I can not live with him. Each cow costs about $800. Most workers don't even make that after saving the entirety of six months wages, if I waited until I lived with him to have kids I might miss my child-bearing age.
I am a father of Swaziland. It is not culturally acceptable for me to address my wife: to talk to her or touch her outside of our home. I have been jobless for 5 years and my family is slowly starving, but we will not eat one of our 28 cows: they are what give us wealth and status. I am a victim of HIV. The government will give me medicine but the nurses don't teach me how to use it, they treat me like a filthy pig and send me on my way. I can't read the directions on the bottle so I try to remember the 5 minute instructions I received before I left with ten prescriptions. Some pills need to be taken with water, others with food, the water at my house has been off for 3 days. If I don't take them religiously, these pills will fail and only one other treatment is available before I become another hopeless case.
