Africa Dispatch
Hello again! We really enjoy producing these newsletters; here is our latest.

PHOTO UPDATES
I loaded a bunch of photos onto poglitshphotos.blogspot.com from our January trip to Mlilwane Nature Reserve with the Brocks. I also posted a number of other photos there today. This most recent batch is drawn from the "archives" and have no particular order or theme; I just like them. For a nice set of photos of the countryside out here, go to the "Trek 1" post. Visit and enjoy!

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES (RUTH)
Nowhere is the gap between American and Swazi culture larger than in our attitudes towards fires. A prime example of this occurred last week. I walked outside and noticed an unusual amount of smoke (between trash and cooking fires some smoke, of varying degrees of noxiousness, is often present). I decided to walk around the house to investigate. I found the school grounds ablaze. The fire had escaped from the trash pit and torched the grass. Since some grass was quite tall, it was blazing vigorously. What I found interesting was the total lack of concern. Several students were loitering near (but not in the smoke of) the fire. One student (the one who started the fire?) walked up, dumped more trash in the pit, and walked off. I have learned to be much less concerned about these things, but when the fire started heading under our neighbors parked tractor, I reached my limit. With visions of melted tires and exploding gas tanks in my head I went and told the tractor owner's wife about the situation. She turned on a hose that reached about half way to the tractor and sent out a 12 year old who looked at the situation and decided that it deserved his watchful eye, but not his action. I got my watering can and using the water from the hose put out the fire near the tractor. Grace and Selu (a 6 year old neighbor boy) had a high time beating out the fire with leafy branches. Rudy was walking past on his way out of the school grounds and grabbed a student who filled a trash can with water and between the kids and the two of them they put out the side of the fire that was spreading into the school grounds. Rudy then left to take a much-needed walk (does fire apathy now afflict him?) I saw a couple of students filling a bucket. "Good", I thought, "we will get some help now." I had to refill my watering can so I rudely cut in at the faucet (there is a fire happening here after all). The students walked off in the opposite direction with their bucket of water; they had been filling it so that they could mop their classroom. Not once did I see any school staff or students show the slightest interest in the situation. At this point the fire was crossing the fence into a wooded and weedy area of the school garden. Grace and Selu were still dancing around beating out the remnants of the fire that hadn't crossed the fence and at that point I gave up. I told them not to go into the school grounds (there was a lot of fuel there and it could be dangerous) and I went home. I figured if no one else cared, I wasn't going to either.It turned out that in spite of my visions of apocalypse, the fire in the school gardens did burn itself out and didn't incinerate everything in the garden and in the surrounding countryside. Maybe everyone here knows that fires won't cross plowed fields full of green maize. Maybe a few semi-wild peach trees aren't that important. Maybe the garden benefits from occasional fires to help keep the brush down. I don't think I will ever fully understand or appreciate this aspect of Swazi culture.

SCHOOL HAS STARTED
During the school break the government and head teachers were fussing about the OVC bursaries (orphaned and vulnerable children scholarships). The headmasters said they would have nothing to do with the selection process. The government is broke so many parents and guardians were concerned that there would be no money available. I thought the headmasters were unfeeling, but finally got a report which explained their concerns. It turns out that in a bid to fight corruption, there is a commission to punish those who fraudulently give or get OVC bursaries. The principles don't want to be hauled in for corruption. One of their complaints is that there is no definition of a "vulnerable" child. How can they be expected to identify such children and then be liable for prosecution if they don't choose them correctly?School did start and the OVC's were admitted, but school fees are so high now that the government money doesn't cover the cost of the fees. Even the neediest child has to pay E600 during the year, not to mention uniform costs. That amount is roughly equivalent to a month's salary at a poorly-paid job or two weeks at a reasonably paid low-level job. Our school is one of the cheapest. In town, OVC's may need to pay E3,000-E5,000. Most people come up with the money, but it is a mad and stressful scramble. One friend reported that her mother had to go to the hospital because of the stress of getting her children's school fees (but everything did get taken care of). Another friend was very distressed when the rains caused one of their houses to collapse. All of her money had gone to school fees and there wasn't enough to buy the nails to rebuild. But, against the odds, once again she has all of her children and her dead sibling's children in school. A couple of students at the school applied for a St. Vincent de Paul bursary. The scholarship fund doesn't announce its decisions for new applicants until after school has started. This left parents and guardians in a great state of uncertainty, but at least one Nsukumbili student was selected for this year.

LAY UP TREASURES IN HEAVEN
Kit asked me to read her a story the other day. In it there was the verse "Don't lay up your treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." She was asking what it meant to lay up treasure in heaven. That brought to mind a verse we used at the Tuesday night children's meeting when Jesus was judging, "I was hungry and you fed me, I was sick and you visited me...whatever you did unto the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me." So I said, "Well Kit, today I went to the clinic to make sure our friend got proper medicine, and then Sibane had a cut finger and I bandaged that. Make Silolo came over and wanted a cold drink of water because she and Lungile were thirsty. And they were hungry so we made them a sandwich." Jesus says that all of these things were done for him and they are laid up as treasure in heaven." That is one advantage of living here: we do have more opportunities to do these little things in an average day for people outside of our family. Later in the evening I was opening up a bag where we keep the shoes that don't currently fit our children. Faith and Hope had outgrown their shoes and needed to change out. There was a strange smell and I had to take out and clean several pairs of shoes that had white fuzz growing on them. That evening I also had to talk to one of our neighbor kids who has apparently taken a few of our toys home with him. Hopefully it will be a good character building experience for him; he will return the toys, and things will go well. We will see what happens. But these things do remind me that mold and thievery and sickness and poverty and the ugly side of human nature are part of our experiences here on earth. In many ways, living in Swaziland has taught me to make peace with many of these unpleasant aspects of life. My brother was saying that we often have a discrepancy between what we believe in our heads and the way we live. We say, "God is my provider," then we worry excessively about money. That struck me since Rudy and I have been working on a transition plan as to what we will do when we return to the US. That has forced us to think about what it costs to live in the US and job options in an economy that is less robust than it was when we left 10 years ago. We may be faced with the irony that we might earn 3-4 times as much and have less discretionary income. Thinking through these things has helped me to examine where my treasure is. We do a lot to avoid the unpleasant experiences of poverty, physical pain, and death. We also do a lot to build up stockpiles and assurances so that we can allay our fears associated with every scenario where we could suffer poverty, physical pain, and death. In the first situation we are responding to actual events and easily foreseen future events. In the second we are responding to imaginary possibilities. After living in a place where poverty, physical pain, and death are common (and unpleasant--don't get me wrong), I am confronting my fears about these "what if" scenarios. I am not advocating living without any margin-where there are no savings and any little unplanned event causes a major crisis-but I am learning that the world wouldn't end even if one or more of those experiences were to occur in my life. Those events can't touch my treasure if it is in heaven and tough situations give us special opportunities to increase in faith, hope, and love and build up more treasure in heaven. I am slowly getting these things in my head, but we will see how they translate into my life.

ROAD TRIPS (Rudy)
This weekend we went to town for the surprise birthday party of a friend, and spent the night at the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) campus. The whole experience went well, and what struck me most was how well our daughters travel. We wake them up around 6AM on such mornings, and they complete their entire morning routine (potty, dress, brush hair, shoes and socks) in about 45 minutes-just in time to walk out the door to the bus station. Bear in mind we have four daughters 9 and under, the youngest of whom will be 2 in April. They then patiently endure (better than dad, I suspect) the uncertainty of when and how we will get to town (will Shining Star bus come this way this morning? Will we take a kombi? Will we find our places in the back of a pickup truck? Will it rain while we stand here? How will the roads be?). When the transport came (it was a kombi) they endured the sardine-like conditions for the 45 minute trip without a bit of whining or complaining. After a bite of food (their first in the two hours after getting out of bed), they trooped around town with mom while dad ran other errands. They then sat through "boring grown-up conversation" between mom, dad and a Peace Corps Volunteer (though they did get sodas and ice cream) for an hour. Then they waited around for our lift to the party; this waiting included running and playing at the pickup point near a grocery store as customers streamed in and out of the shop. They showed no signs of feeling like the gypsy/vagabond that dad did. They then gleefully piled into the back of our friend's SUV ("Wow, we get to sit in the FAR BACK!") and traveled well all the way to the party.After the festivities we got dropped off at the YWAM campus and made dinner-canned baked beans on spaghetti, seasoned with leftover Ramen noodle mushroom seasoning packets. Again, no complaining. I very much doubt I would have been so sanguine about such a meal when I was their age(s). We all bedded down in one big room and slept quite well.At 8:15 the next (rainy) morning, they again coped well with the uncertainty of getting into town (YWAM is too far from the city center to walk, and Grace had a mildly-twisted ankle, and we did not have any umbrellas to deal with the rain); but when I whistled and shouted that the taxi driver had indeed found the place, they trotted as fast as they could to get in the car. After Mass, the Rugumambaju's (our Ugandan friends) packed us into their compact car and dropped us off near the ATM. We got money, jogged over to the bus rank, boarded the next kombi to Dlangeni, and an hour later entered the front door. The girls were magnificent, and this is not rare for them. I am very proud of them. I like to think they are gaining useful skills in coping and being helpful and having fun in different situations, even when they are not exactly sure what is going to happen next.

JABZILLA ATTACKS THE BANANA PLANTATION
The photo says it all. We recently purchased a very large bunch of bananas (about 200) from a community member, and they quickly ripened. Jabu likes bananas-for eating, but especially for peeling. We found a pile of peeled bananas and their peels sitting beside the front door. See here where Jabzilla peeled one of the sweet yellow fruits and told the Chevy Tahoe where to get off. Call in the jeep-mounted rocket launcher-Jabzilla is on the loose!

PRAYER REQUEST
On Sunday February 5th Jabu and I went for a bike ride. As on previous outings, I got warnings of Jabu's immediate demise ("She'll fall!") and requests to take her (I still can't get my head around this one: "Yeah sure, here, take my daughter home with you forever. She's yours! Enjoy!") and the much-tamer "I am asking for sweets".Climbing one of the last hills towards home, we passed two grade-school boys. One of them started in: "I am asking" (and I braced myself for the money/sweets petition) "that God" (oh boy, this kid's gonna try to leverage me with an appeal to God) "will give you a boy".I was stunned. Having a son is a big deal here, as they inherit the homestead, care for you when you are old, and maintain the family name. In regular conversations I gently explain that we don't mind if we have boys or girls, because we love all the children God gives us. But the gravity, sincerity and selflessness of this boy's request caught me off-guard. I just said "Thank you very much". If he really prays with the same conviction and earnestness with which he explained his prayer request, I would not be surprised if God grants him his wish. We would be fine with that.

MOVIE RECOMMENDATION
Sunday night is movie night at our house. This Sunday we watched Bella, starring Eduardo Verastegui and Tammy Blanchard. If you would like a movie that does not have 1) violence, 2) foul language, and 3) gratuitous sex; but DOES have 1) interesting characters, 2) personal loss, rescue, and redemption, 3) unexpected plot twists, 4) family values (but not overdone so as to distract from the story), 5) great music, and 6) a happy ending, then PG 13-rated (for seriousness of themes and a non-glamorous car crash) Bella is for you. It won the people's award at the Toronto Film Festival. Highly recommended. Enjoy.Have a great day!The Poglitshs