Swaziland is nothing like I expected. This country is beautiful.
The countryside is covered by hills that are full of luscious green grass and trees. It isn’t desolate at all. I had pictured desert with lots of sick people everywhere; a hard place.
What greeted me was quite different; the people here are super friendly. Everyone is willing to help you and most throw a God Bless your way when they are done. In the two big cities that we have been to, Manzini and Mbabane, there is a lot of construction going on.
The stores I have gone to are extremely clean and most are nicer than America grocery stores. I found this really weird because in the rest of Africa none of the stores were all that nice.
To put it simply Swaziland gives off all the sights of a country growing, and growing pretty quickly. The sad truth is that is dieing.
Over 50% of the population has AIDS. The thing that makes it even worse is that none of them want to know or get checked for HIV. I suppose the chances are so high that they have it that they would rather just live without knowing, you cant really blame them.
This obviously doesn’t help the prevention of the deadly sickness.
In the last 4ish years around 300,000 people have died. One of the ministry contacts said when they got here the population was 1.2 million, now it is at a mere 920,000.
You can easily see that the country has a small population because everything is quite spread out and there doesn’t seem to be as much poverty as in South Africa or Mozambique. From what I have seen many people have their own land as well.
This is probably my favorite country so far. The country is beautiful the people are beautiful, and over 80% are Christian. It is an incredible place. It breaks my heart knowing that the people are dieing out so fast though. What will happen when they are gone? Can we do something to stop this epidemic that is wiping them out?
Pictures coming soon….
