Touring Swaziland
Equal in hospitality, but with less traffic, less crime, less politics, and more laid back, Swaziland was a welcome change from South Africa. We spent five days in the peaceful Ezulwini valley where beautiful low and mellow mountains stood as a backdrop. Sean, from England, owned the Swaziland Backpackers, a comfortable hostel, simply furnished with copious pillows on carpets. There we met John, a football enthusiast from England who has traveled to most of the World Cup and World Championship games since the early 90′s. With his shaved head and earring, David teasingly called him a “soccer hooligan.” Every morning he stood out on the front room balcony with binoculars catching sight of very many birds and familiarized us with their names. In the evenings we stood around a smokey fire and chatted with other guests including John, and a Swedish/Romanian couple from a small island between Finland and Sweden, young Australians, young Norwegians, and Sean and his staff. Most of the tourists were headed for the World Cup. Their excitement was infectious and I look forward to following the games of the World Cup as we travel in Mozambique.
Bicycling through Swaziland in areas such as the wonderfully hilly road down the valley to Sebeka Rock, or the expansive green sugar cane fields flanked by the cliffs of the Lebombo Mountains, or the delightful game park where hippos and rhinoceros lazed and grazed just beyond our compound’s fence and where the staff were wonderful to us, one might imagine Shangri-la to appear around the next bend. Swaziland is not a paradise, however. It has one of Africa’s highest infection rates of HIV/AIDS. Twenty-six percent of the adult population, mostly between the ages of 15 and 35 are HIV positive. Twenty thousand young adults a year are dying of AIDS in a country where the total population is only one million. HIV infection rates are very high in all of southern Africa, including South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi, countries we are riding through. Why is it so high here? It is a heterosexual disease, affecting men and women alike, and children born from sick mothers. The strain of the disease here, HIV1 as opposed to HIV2 (found in other parts of Africa and the world) is a particularly virulent one and easier to catch. It gained a foothold early on in the general population long before people were aware of its existence. In the 80′s and 90′s some African governments ignored or even denied the problem as other parts of the world were taking steps to contain and control the disease. Nelson Mandela acknowledged his own lack of understanding and lack of leadership in addressing the pandemic after his 50 year old son died of AIDS in 2005. Other reasons for the virus’s deadly success go hand in hand with poverty. Lack of quality education, lack of quality health care, lack of resources to access quality education and quality health care, lack of understanding of both the biology of disease and the biology of fighting disease—these realities are part of the everyday life of the average person. Projects to provide anti-retroviral drugs (which help people live) for free or at a minimal cost have made some inroads but funding is slowing and the same realities of poverty hinder the effective use of the drugs. My long ago Liberian friend, Rachel, would have explained the reason for the high infection and death rate in this way, “Disease is used to the poor.”
As David and I travel in our cursory way we don’t see the disease’s devastation. We do see some billboards educating people about HIV/AIDS and about healthy sexual practices, but we aren’t aware of the sick people or orphaned children as we go through villages. I wonder sometimes when I see a very thin person or when I observe (in some places in South Africa) that one of the most substantial businesses in town is the funeral home. In South Africa very many of the people with whom we had conversations were involved with the disease in some way. Some educated the public; one woman was helping young mothers die in hospice care; many worked or volunteered in orphanages where children are fed, but where most go home to grandparents who are raising their dead children’s children; some worked or volunteered in other HIV/AIDS projects or donated money. One person described it as a hidden disease, but if so, its tentacles envelope enormous numbers of people in southern Africa. As a relatively fast moving traveler I can only imagine the devastating effects of this disease over the past decades and in the coming decades in this part of the world.
