Voices From the Field: Swaziland

Hearing each of their voices and unique perspectives was life for my soul. I love these guys. God is breaking them in beautiful ways. Some subtle, some uncomfortably obvious. I want you to hear the words of one of the students, Lila Dillon. She’s been in Swaziland, the most AIDS-ridden country on earth, for 3 months now. I want you to hear her thoughts…and more importantly, I want you to see God’s hand at work. Broken beauty.

I have lived a normal life. I have two parents, two brothers, and a dog. I lived in a house. I went to school K-12. I went to movies on the weekends with my friends. I checked “white”, unfortunately, on every standardized test I’ve taken. I like Coldplay. My life has been pretty stereotypical and predictable. Nothing special. Then God told me to go to Africa and I was enthralled. Finally, I would not be normal. Life would be exciting and not the usual, American mundane. In Africa I’ll find adventure. The air will taste new and exciting. Every day will bring something different. In Swaziland, in the most AIDS ridden nation on the planet, I’ll see the worst of the worst and be entirely broken and transformed into this selfless, perfect version of myself.

If only that’s how it worked. Instead of being struck with how different and out of the ordinary, out of my ordinary, Africa is, I am struck with the normality that I’m beginning to believe pervades all life. There’s a rhythm to life, and though it may be faster or slower, or accompanied by different instruments, it’s the same throughout the whole planet. As humans, we adapt and acclimate and normalize. It’s just what we do. I don’t feel different here. I don’t act different here. I am the same person here that I am at home. I find myself in the most absurdly un-normal situations behaving as if these things happen to me everyday, as if I grew up like this.

 Yesterday I was sitting on a grass mat outside of the round hut made of sticks with a straw roof of an African woman who has AIDS and a daughter and grandson to support eating this strange little fruit called a marula and had to give myself a reality check. This was in no way normal. I do not do this everyday. But somehow, my body and my brain were pretending like I did. Last week Kate and I were driving down the highway in our beat up kombi, windows down, music turned up loud, on the left side of the road, looking out on fields and fields of sugar cane backed by huge blueish green mountains, and I felt just like I do when driving down old 98 looking out over the ocean. It is certainly not the same though. I wake up in the mornings, brush my teeth, get a bowl of cereal. So normal. Except for the miniscule detail that I’m in Swaziland, Africa.

In a way, this normalization is comforting. You begin to feel like you belong here and you no longer feel like such a foreigner. Because of this, Nsoko has started to feel like home. In other ways though, it’s uncomfortably disconcerting. Everything begins to become normal. The 10 year old who carries her 1 year old nephew around on her back all the time because both of his parents are dead and he has no one left to take care of him becomes okay. The kids with massive, Santa like bellies and stick skinny arms from malnutrition become simply cute, and not heartbreaking. You hear a story about a mother and child hit and killed on the side of the road by a drunk driver, creating the world’s next two orphans, and calmly and unaffectedly place it in the overflowing box labeled “Tragedies” in your head. You see kids playing with dead birds and tampon applicators they dug out of your trash because they have nothing else to play with and continue to think about what exactly you want to do tomorrow.

I’m not okay with this. It’s not fine that everything here is normal to me, because it’s not normal. Normal isn’t destitute poverty. Normal isn’t lacking the money it takes to feed your family. Normal is not a 40% rate of HIV/AIDS. Normal is not a country full of orphans. How have I become so hardened and calloused to the heartbreaking lives of the people I have come to love here? How can I look at them and not be overcome with compassion? Why do I have to normalize? It would be worth it to be uncomfortable here for the entire six months if I could only live in the knowledge of the pain that these people feel their whole lives.