The next morning the grass was wet, but there hadn't been the significant downpour everyone hoped for.
Monday's schedule was a killer. Because we'd be driving to Mbabane and the Swazi Cultural Center on the next day, Tuesday, our last day had a long agenda: We were visiting a community savings and credit group, another Hope Center, a PLWHA --- People Living With HIV and AIDS --- garden project, and a bore hole water project.
In between we were having a last meeting with the Mhlosheni staff over lunch.
ASCAS is a World Vision acronym for Accumulated Savings and Credit Associations. (Sometimes World Vision feels like an acronym machine that's run amok, like the chocolate machine on that old black-and-white episode of I Love Lucy. In our time there we saw lots of the ADP's SPs trying to take care of their OVCs through NCPs and HCs. Which reads sponsorship promoters and orphaned and vulnerable children and neighborhood care points and Hope Centers )
Susan was particularly interested in exploring how these groups created what were in essence small community credit unions, saving money and loaning each other funds with strict guidelines and solid bookkeeping.
I wasn't all that interested in ASCAS, or didn't understand their impact, until we got there and met the group. The Jerusalem community had 19 members in two groups. We met ten of them in a turquoise-painted room near the Jerusalem community school, with exposed wooden beams and sun streaming through the windows.
I've never liked the word "empowered," seeing it as overused and freighted with socio-babble. But there was no way around it: these eight women and two men were empowered and alive and eager to reinforce the positive tangent their lives had taken.
Anyone in the community can join the ASCAS group, though women make up the majority of the members in all of them. They decide upon joining whether they want to save 20 or 100 E Swazi a month, equivalent to about $3 or $15 per month.
The money goes into a Production Fund, which forms the capital for loans and business projects, and a Social Fund, which is available for emergency loans to community members.
A six to twelve month cycle determines the amount of time the funds are locked up for use by the group, and how disbursement of the savings and profits will occur at the end of the cycle.
Most women in rural Swaziland are entirely dependent on their husbands for income. If they need money for new pots or bedding they need to ask their husbands, probably adding to the financial stress of a man already looking for work in a shattered economy.
Members of the ASCAS group very soon see positive cash flows from the savings portion of the program. At the end of a cycle the extra cash can pay for school fees, new clothes, furniture or even an electric stove.
These women were vibrant and entrepreneurial. They had some cash in the Production Fund and were looking for a project to begin funding. Susan had bought a simple handbag in Johannesburg, and before the meeting was over they'd emptied it, turned it inside out, and decided that they could easily make a prototype while they figured out market access and sales projections.
It was fun to see their joy and eagerness, and there was a palpable sense that we were watching a handful of ordinary Swazis pull themselves rung-by-rung from a life of poverty and despair. All World Vision had done was give them training and simple tools and enough support to make them believe in themselves.
Susan made them a gift of the handbag, so they could figure out how to begin making similar ones. She put all her own belongings in a plastic bag for the rest of the day.
Climbing into the van I saw Susan happily clutching her plastic bag of belongings and the Swazi women pour again over the bright handbag, and thought that in a small way we'd seen the type of resource leveling that's required if we're to push back against global poverty.
At 1:00 we were back in Mhlosheni for lunch with the staff and our debriefing --- a review of how things had gone in the last five days of racing around the Mhlsoheni ADP's red dirt roads, streams, and hills, listening, watching and learning.
We gave our feedback and made suggestions, and asked them for a song. Listening to them sing together, especially Nonjabu with her belting, tremendous alto, had been a highlight of our time in Mhlosheni. They agreed, as long as we'd sing one for them. (Apparently our oddity hadn't worn off yet.)
We traded songs, singing as separate groups and then interspersed in a big circle in the conference room, singing You're My Everything while Bonginkosi slapped his broad hand on a bible to provide percussion. By the end of it we were dancing in a weaving line through the conference room: eight ordinary suburban white Americans and the same number of extraordinary, hard-working African Swazis with hearts that broke for children, dancing in praise and fellowship.
It was nothing less than beautiful, and I don't understand it yet. But I can still feel it.
We visited a garden project called PLWHA, or People Living With HIV and AIDS. One of the critical health issues with HIV-positive patients is that good diets must be maintained to both stabilize general health and support the anti-retroviral medicine that comes free from the government.
This garden project and others like it were done through World Vision support in the form of seedlings, agricultural training and fertilizers. It produced cabbages, corn and beets for the 15 HIV-positive people who farmed it, giving them health, self-respect, and a sense of taking control of their lives.
The chair person spoke to us for some time about the garden's impact on his friends and neighbors. As a thundercloud developed behind us he talked about providing vegetables and produce to their non-HIV neighbors, and how it had helped them break down the barriers created by the disease. These neighbors had even come to the garden to help with weeding and harvesting.
He talked about a new project by the group, where they'd collect wild bees and sell the honey. He proudly demonstrated the collection trap and the hive box.
I watched the eight people sitting on the ground carefully. They were ordinary people, ranging in age from teenagers to elderly, and all of them seem robust and healthy. They looked down shyly or looked at us directly, in the same ratio that would occur in any group of normal healthy Americans.
One young man in the corner looked surly and sullen. He wore the ubiquitous blue jumper of the Swazi laborer. His eyes were angry and hooded, and he wouldn't look at us as the questions and answer went back and forth.
I thought that I would be bitter too, if I were sick and someone paraded a bunch of healthy overfed Americans through my garden.
And then the chairperson announced his final measure of success: "And in the two years we've been running this garden no one in our group has died."
What more could be said? The food, the direction, and the unflinching support of World Vision were keeping these people alive.
Andy asked the chairperson if we could pray with them and he said yes. We made a circle in the field, with every other person being a member of the garden or a member of our World Vision group, and clenched hands.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that the thunderstorm was almost on us. I could see the rain falling from it, and lightning jab downward. As Andy gave a prayer of thanks for the openness and warmth of the gardeners, and as he soulfully requested that God help them continue in their good health, the rain finally began to fall in earnest.
Andy's prayer was a psalm of thanksgiving for the rain that had begun to soak the earth and could perhaps bring forth its abundance, and for the openness of these people in sharing with us about the very thing that stigmatized and marginalized them. We broke our circle and each of us shook hands with each of them and gave our personal thanks.
The last person whose hand I reached for was the surly-looking young man. He stood level with me and smiled when I smiled. When he smiled his scowling sullen look disappeared, and I saw that he was just a young man looking for God's grace in a difficult time.
I said, "Thank you for helping us understand."
He said, "God bless you."
"And you."
When we were back in the van lightning flashed freely on the hills all around us and I remembered my little statistic about more people being struck by lightning in Swaziland, per capita, than in any other country.
Thinking about the HIV-positive young man in the blue jumper, I asked Bonginkosi for the siSwati word for Hope. He said, "Litsemba."
A day, I thought, of lightning and litsemba.
-------------------------------------------
The day wasn't done. This was our fifth and last full day in the ADP and we had things to see and understand.
We visited a bore hole water project that was partly funded by World Vision Reaching 41 meters in to the earth, the simple pump brought up clean fresh water year round, regardless, for now, of weather and rainfall.
The community was called Hosea, and the pastor who had worked so hard to get the well sited and dug gave us an explanation and a tour.
Situated on a dirt road (what else?) on the edge of Hosea, families still had to walk many miles up and down steep hills to fetch and carry water, but at least it was now clean.
I knew that by providing clean, fresh water to a community you could cut infant mortality in half. But the abstract numbers became real when the pastor showed us the watering holes that the new pump replaced.
Fetid and muddy water sat below steep banks. When this water dried up every day, the pastor explained, women would come and sleep by the hole, waiting for the groundwater to seep back in.
In a second watering hole further upstream we found two young boys filling water jugs for their mother. They looked at us in wide-eyed wonder, and didn't really understand why we seemed so shocked at the water they were drawing.
A girl came down and eyed us curiously, then took the filling scoop and drank from it.
How could we explain infant mortality, cholera, and water-borne microbes in a way that they could understand? This was a hard place.
Still, as we drove home I looked around at the sun setting below the thunderclouds, and at the wash of orange light on every rock and shrub, and thought that the hills of Mhlosheni were very beautiful.
These hills and valleys and kopjes are beautiful in the way that only really hard places can be beautiful. In harsh environments where the dividing lines between life and death are very narrow, beauty must present itself in novel ways.
We said goodbye to Mhlosheni for the last time and returned to the Nhlangano Sun. The next morning we'd drive to Mbabane and the Eelzuwini valley, to spend our last day in Swaziland learning a bit more about Swazi culture.
We were all a bit subdued. The people of Mhlosheni, from the children we sponsor to the staff who'd led us in our exploration of the place, had begun to feel like family.
They made one last attempt over dinner to teach us to say the name of the place with the proper accents and pronunciation. It was something like "um-ploh-SHEH-nee," but spoken in a seamless, unbroken stream of sound. I thought Susan came closest to the right intonation, but judging by the tears of laughter in Bonginkosi's eyes I guessed we still had a lot to learn.
I posted the Sunday blog entry through my cell phone.
Then I watched the lightning and the heavy warm rain, thought of my family, and fell asleep.
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