Egumeni
Next stop: Swaziland
From Lesotho, I went to Swaziland to learn about the Egumeni project. The name “egumeni” refers to an old African practice that has been lost to most communities with the rise of modernity and individualization—even in the most rural communities. With egumeni, women would sit around in a circle and share their chores, keep one another company, as well as disseminate any knowledge they had to share. This is also how children, and in particular, young girls were raised and brought up to know the customs and expectations of their village.
The Egumeni Project seeks to reintegrate this practice into the life of the community with the hope of reestablishing communication between the elders and the youth—with the addition of also providing the elders with correct information on HIV/AIDS to pass down to the kids.
This particular program was just implemented about 6 months ago on a one-year trial grant. However, based on the conversations that I had with various fieldworkers, I don’t think this program will have very much difficult getting continues funding (at least I hope not). (Below is a picture of me with one of the organizers—a very inspiring woman). While I believe there is hope of expanding this program to a reach a wider demographic, for the time being it is focusing on grandmothers as the primary disseminators of this knowledge. 
I spoke to a few of the field workers and parish organizers in Nkhaba and Luyengo, as well as a few of the grannies in the program. All of them speak very highly of its efficacy and expressed so much gratitude for it bringing them back to their roots. They also shared some very touching stories about how the program has directly impacted their own lives or those of their loved ones. (But I’m not going to write about them here—I have to have something to tell you in person, after all!) Picture below is of
one of the grannies.
One of the days when we were already out in a pretty rural area, we also stopped at another care point, a small orphanage, to drop off some toothpaste and other personal hygienic supplies. Again, one of the first things out of their mouths was to ask if I had my camera—and then they proceeded to pose for a good 15+ minutes and laugh hysterically when I showed them the pics. But they were also SO happy to be getting toothpaste—in a way that I have never EVER seen a child so interested in or excited about toothpaste.
On the long drive from Mbabane to Lomahasha (really only a couple of hours, but it seemed longer), we stopped by another couple of sites. One was a small school. The school was a one-room, severely dilapidated building. There were a few benches, used as a desk top and some chairs. When we walked in, all the kids (about 12 of them) were hard at work writing their letters. There was one teacher, who was also a local priest, and informed us that he was just filling in because they had no other teacher—but that he had been filling in there for several months now, and they have no prospects of finding another teacher yet. Below is a pic of the kids at school.
