I went back to my reading but got up periodically to observe the fire. While the smoke plume remained huge, the fire didn’t seem to be moving. After a while, Liz drove by. She was obviously observing the situation as well. I flagged her down and asked if we should be concerned. While visibly showing some concern, Liz said that we shouldn’t worry. If the fire did start moving our way, she felt the fire breaks on their property would stop it before it became threatening. She also indicated that her son Patrick would certainly be the first to raise an alarm since his house would be the first to be in danger, especially considering his thatch roof. Her primary concern seemed to be with the environmental impact that all the smoke was having. She said that the fire was probably started by locals seeking honey from beehives. Evidently, their tactics consist of generating smoke to get the bees to leave their hive so that the honey can be removed without interference. Liz was upset not only with the impact that these methods generate, but also that the honey seekers don’t always put out their fires.
I returned to reading and began to speculate what work would be like when we started in the morning. After two weekend days, we were very content with our surroundings. We felt as if we were on vacation in a small cabin in a California state park. The small stove in the kitchen required a match to light the bottled gas, and there was no dishwasher. There was, however, a clothes washer and dryer. We decided to give them a try. Although the controls on the washer had unfamiliar symbols, we pretty much figured it out. We put in the clothes and the detergent, and when we pushed one of the buttons, it started. Unfortunately, I came back later to find the floor flooded. After investigating, I determined that the drain hose from the washer had come out of the drain pipe and irrigated the floor. I went over to Liz’s house to get a mop and then got up all the water. At least we knew the floor was really clean.
Wendy had been quietly working on her computer in the kitchen, periodically staring out of the window through the steel bars that prevented burglary. At one point she detected a slight shadow and lifted her head to see a vervet monkey calmly sitting on the window ledge outside the bars. He stuck his hand through the bars and reached around a bit, but he couldn’t reach anything of interest. (The bars were configured to prevent nonhuman burglary as well.) After the two stared at each other for a while, the monkey calmly left. It was just a brief encounter but was one of the many small clues that reminded us that we weren’t in California. As we settled in over the next few weeks, we frequently saw families of monkeys playing among the eucalyptus off to the side of our house and occasionally in the mulberry tree in our front yard. It was almost like a visit to the zoo every day.
On Monday, we started work, and the first thing we saw when we went to the office was the morning paper. The front-page story, complete with picture, was about a woman who was seriously burned in an outhouse explosion. As the very detailed article explained, evidently someone had been using gasoline to clean grease off some car parts. After completing the cleaning, the excess solvent and dissolved grease had been thrown down the local outhouse. Shortly thereafter the unsuspecting woman had sat down to do her business, and while sitting, lit up a cigarette and threw the match down the hole. The resulting explosion did extensive damage to the outhouse and seriously burned the woman in some sensitive areas. However, she was expected to fully recover. That was the major national news story in Swaziland that day.
We learned that the flavor of Monday’s front-page story was typical, and Tuesday’s front page didn’t disappoint as it combined human interest with politics. It was about the speaker of Parliament and his speech on the sexual performance of Swazi men. Swaziland had the world’s highest rate of AIDS with its resulting mortality. The death rate from AIDS was of great concern to the government since it typically killed young adults in their most economically productive years and often left orphans behind. It was well known that the major cause of the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland was multiple concurrent partners engaging in unprotected sex. The parliament was debating whether they could do anything to remedy this situation and reduce the rate of AIDS. At this point, the speaker of the Parliament arose and gave an impassioned speech. He said that the major problem was that too many Swazi men did not know how to sexually satisfy their wives. Consequently, the women were seeking satisfaction with other partners and causing the AIDS problem. He exhorted Swazi men to do a better job of satisfying their wives and keeping them at home. We learned that stories like these or features on domestic violence and corruption frequently grabbed the daily headlines because Swaziland did not play a major role in geopolitics. For us, the novelty of reading the local tabloids quickly wore off.
Getting down to work, we spent our first week getting started on our primary projects. Wendy began working with Atiba, a TechnoServe colleague, to create a School-Age Youth Entrepreneurship (SAYE) program to inspire a pool of school-age (teens and early twenties) Swazis to become entrepreneurs. The primary activities within the program would be to introduce these youth to the business world and the skills necessary to create a business. Although the government, banks, and the local offices of a few international corporations provided good jobs for some of the best students, the country had 50 percent unemployment, and many people felt that they had to leave for South Africa to find a decent job. The hope was that with business knowledge and especially entrepreneurship skills, young Swazis might find or even create economic opportunity in their own country. Wendy was a perfect fit for the role, and Leslie was happy to have someone with Wendy’s prior experience in Junior Achievement.
For their first activity, Atiba and Wendy met with several groups in rural and urban areas to understand how to leverage any existing youth-oriented business/entrepreneurship activities, especially the already-established “pre-voc” (prevocational or school-to-work) pilot schools. Their experience in visiting two of the “pre-voc” schools and meeting with some of the graduates quickly convinced them that this was a “big aid” experiment that had failed.
The pre-voc program had supposedly been catalyzed by Mozambicans’ migration to Swaziland during their civil war. These refugees came with nothing, but many started their own tiny businesses and over time began to hire Swazis. Seeing the immigrant Mozambicans hiring Swazis made the Swazi government very uncomfortable, and so they decided that their students needed better classes in entrepreneurship. They received a big grant from the Africa Development Bank. Farm machinery, farm animals, new labs, and classrooms were purchased and placed in sixteen pilot schools across the country. After only a few meetings, it was clear to Wendy and Atiba that the “pre-voc” programs had significant problems. Among the obvious problems were the four large tractors that were purchased for training students but never delivered to the high schools and the minimal animal husbandry that could be taught because the animals at many schools were exclusively female.
According to the teachers, the program had been imposed on them and the schools from above, inadequately marketed to parents and teachers, and implemented with minimal teacher training. Also angering parents and teachers was the lack of impact measurement or additional certification for students who completed the program. The pre-voc program originators also improperly set expectations by promising but then not delivering financial support for graduated pre-voc students to start businesses.
As Wendy and Atiba continued their research, another visit was hosted by a native Swazi who had graduated from Colorado State University and then earned a master’s degree from Colorado School of Mines before returning to Swaziland. Five years earlier, his village’s young boys had banded together to explore how to create businesses so that they could become employed. As expected of many group efforts, less than 20 percent of the students did more than 80 percent of the work on the initial bean-growing project, but the project still achieved a $100 profit. Five years later, the profit had not been used, no other businesses had been started, and the bean-growing success had not been sustained. It was clear that the youth did not understand how to create a viable business. The young men were still living at home with no income source of their own. Although some of the young men had once displayed initiative, the Swazi host for the visit felt that most of the young people lacked motivation.
The next meeting occurred between TechnoServe and LULOTE, a training firm that TechnoServe had identified as a potential local partner. Everyone in the meeting agreed that the pre-voc education was not adequately preparing students for entrepreneurship and was unlikely to become the foundation for TechnoServe’s planned youth program. They also discussed other possibilities. No one knew of any existing program in Swaziland that actually provided hands-on learning about business such as how businesses start and how the money system works. Any advice for small businesses and the few entrepreneurs in the country was offered only by paid consultants. Even UNISWA (the University of Swaziland) only offered theoretical courses on business without any experiential content. From her prior experience, Wendy knew that Junior Achievement had established successful programs in multiple African countries as well as in numerous developing countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. After further discussion, there was agreement that Junior Achievement would be the best platform on which to build the Swazi youth program. Wendy was assigned to make the initial inquiries to Junior Achievement about starting a new country program in Swaziland. For her first step, she arranged for Atiba, Leslie, and herself to meet with the director of the JA South Africa office in Johannesburg. On the same trip, they also planned to visit a one-stop business center, cofounded and cofunded by multiple financial and consulting organizations, that helped budding entrepreneurs in Johannesburg to get information and the support they would need to start and operate businesses.
Later, the combined TechnoServe and LULOTE team met with the chief inspector in the Ministry of Education and four of his key staff to validate their findings on the pre-voc program. The role of the chief inspector is to monitor the quality of secondary education across Swaziland. The discussion was frank, and despite some finger-pointing at teachers and the poor marketing of the program, the inspectors seemed to agree that the pre-voc program was not successful and unlikely to change without a major overhaul. Additionally distracting to the inspector’s staff was a concurrent initiative to implement the new International General Certificate for Secondary Education (IGCSE) based on the British education model. The ministry seemed to look to TechnoServe and LULOTE as experts to help solve their problems, and the team did agree to come back to them with some possible strategies.
While Wendy was starting on the youth program, I learned that my focus would be on working with specific entrepreneurs who needed help creating or growing businesses, consistent with TechnoServe’s local mandate. In many countries, TechnoServe worked primarily with smallholder farmers and agro-processing companies since 80 percent of the world’s poor were farmers. However, in Swaziland, the focus was on helping people to start or grow small and medium enterprises in any industry, which could also include agriculture. Since the program in Swaziland was new, we had a two-pronged approach. We accepted requests for help from anyone with reasonable business prospects while at the same time we broadly researched the local economy to see what industries or agricultural sectors in Swaziland might be able to become reasonably competitive.
My first two clients had come to TechnoServe for help. Prior to my arrival, they both had met briefly with Leslie and dropped off their business plans. I spent my first week familiarizing myself with their plans before meeting with them in person. The first one that I studied was MPE Timbers. Their plan was to pressure-treat wooden poles with preservatives. Pressure treating allows electric and telephone utilities to put poles into the ground where they resist rotting and destructive insects for many years. Swaziland didn’t have a high-quality pole treatment company, but they had lots of raw timber for poles. A large portion of Swaziland is covered with commercial forests, also known as timber plantations. As we later drove through these areas, we saw miles and miles of straight trees growing in straight rows at regular spacing. It was obvious that Mother Nature had some help in creating these forests.
Swaziland’s electric utility company was conducting a program of rural electrification using imported pressure-treated poles. With seemingly ready access to raw material and no local competition, our entrepreneurs, Brian and Robert, had seen a business opportunity. They had found a used pressure-treating facility that was for sale, so they put in some of their own money, recruited some investors, took out a loan from the local development agency, and started a company. The loan was secured by the equipment to be purchased, but also personally guaranteed. As Brian and Robert surveyed their market and access to further capital, they heard nothing but good news. Their business plans showed high profitability and a very quick payback on their investment, especially for large utility poles, which were in high demand as both Swaziland and South Africa expanded their electrical transmission grids. The used equipment that the entrepreneurs had located was larger and more expensive to purchase and install than what they had originally planned, but it would allow them to treat large utility poles, so they expanded their plans for the factory and moved forward with confidence. As they installed the equipment and constructed the required buildings for the plant, their cash began to run low, and they sought additional financing. Although the climate for investment had seemed very bright before, it suddenly became dark, and they could not get funds. They tried many sources, but although they were complimented on their business plans, every institution turned them down.
After much searching, they were introduced to a local investor who said that money would be no problem and agreed to give them what they needed. They verbally agreed on a disbursement schedule, and the pole plant again started moving toward production. Very quickly, the investor said that he was having problems collecting amounts due him from government projects, and he could not deliver cash in the amounts and on the agreed to schedule. Although the investor ultimately gave our entrepreneurs 80 percent of what he had initially promised, they again ran out of cash, having only performed test runs at the plant with no significant sales.
MPE Timbers had come to TechnoServe to help them find financing for a project that still looked very favorable on paper; although the estimates of the capital required were now triple what they had been originally. We all agreed that our review and recommendations on the project might lend it sufficient credibility to get a better chance at funding. I felt the whole story was strange because it had been six years since the company had been formed and over four years since they had taken out the original loan. This was a different business world for me. I was accustomed to the pace of Silicon Valley where things happen fast, and when you run out of money, you sell the furniture, vacate the premises, and move on to your next job within a few months. If this was such a good business, why hadn’t it succeeded? Or if it wasn’t, why hadn’t it been put out of its misery? This was a very different animal, and I was intrigued to figure out what could and should be done.
As I asked questions around the office, I learned that from the perspective of local economic development, everyone was enthusiastic about this project and still wanted it to succeed. It would provide over two hundred jobs in Swaziland, including harvesting the timber. It would also provide the local utilities with home-grown poles at a much lower cost. It looked great on paper. I thought maybe I could apply my consulting experience to understand the situation and create a potential solution.
As I puzzled over MPE, I read the business plan from my second client. He wanted to start a bottled water company. A group of college students had done a study for him of the local bottled water market and found that there were approximately eight companies competing, including Coke and Nestle. They also found wide discrepancies in the prices that these companies charged and consequently concluded that the price that is charged doesn’t matter much to consumers. Our entrepreneur thought he would be able to capture 20 percent of the market. He owned some land with a well that would be his source of water and had analyzed what equipment a bottling plant would need and what it would cost to purchase and operate it. He had committed to putting up 15 percent of the total investment himself and was looking to borrow the other 85 percent. Because this was already a large amount of money, he decided that he couldn’t afford to set up his own distribution capability, so he planned to subcontract it.
In business school, we occasionally got cases like these, often on exams. They were great vehicles for demonstrating everything you knew about an area of business because there were so many things that you could explain were wrong and why. Sometimes after discussing a case in class, the professor told us what had happened to the company. With this type of case, we always hoped it wasn’t the one exception in a million that was successful despite violating every known business principle. I don’t remember a single case that surprised us. knew the right answer for my client. My challenge was how to tell him in a credible and empathetic way.
In discussing this with my junior colleague, Mpendulo (again, hum the m, then “pen-du-lo” with long vowel sounds for the u and the o), I explained that the only way that this business could succeed would be to establish a unique brand that addressed a specific niche and to do this with very little money available for advertising (against Coke and Nestle). Obviously tongue in cheek, I suggested that we start a rumor that this water would either heal very sick people or increase male potency. Those were the only ways I could think of to make this business successful. More seriously, we set about collecting information that would clearly demonstrate the futility to our client.
For both Wendy and me, the first week of work was intense as we jumped into our new assignments, and the days went by quickly. To our surprise, after only one week of work, we got a three-day weekend. Saturday was declared a national holiday in Swaziland because it was the birthday of the prior king, Sobhuza II (“So-bu-za” with long vowel sounds for the o and u, short for the a). As with many holidays in Swaziland, the holiday declaration seemed to come at the last minute and to be a surprise, even though Sobhuza II’s birthday was well known. Sobhuza II was the father of the current king, Mswati III, and the longest reigning monarch in any country in history. (It must have been his eighty wives who kept him healthy). Leslie decided that it would be unfair to celebrate a holiday on a Saturday, so she closed the office on Monday and gave us all a three-day weekend. Not bad for our first week on the job. We rented a car and drove to Kruger Park in South Africa for three days of big game viewing.
Back at work on Tuesday, Mpendulo and I met with the man who wanted to start a bottled water company. He was a very pleasant, gray-haired gentleman, probably not much older than me. He was retired but had a BS degree from Penn State University in agricultural mechanization, which had been his specialty throughout his career. Based on his idea and a good source of clean water, he had hired one consultant to write a business plan for the bottled water business and another consultant from the beverage industry to develop a set of specifications for a bottling plant.
However hopeful, our entrepreneur had very little in the way of ideas as to how he would compete with the large companies that were already in the market. He thought that he might be able to get preferences from local merchants because his would be a local Swazi company. He had talked to a number of retailers, although not the large ones, who had been encouraging, but all told him to come back when he had actual product to sell. He indicated that local hotels already had deals with existing water companies, but he thought he could break into this market if he formed a partnership with Tibiyo, the Royal Swazi company, that had investments and influence in many businesses throughout Swaziland. He hadn’t yet talked to Tibiyo in the two years that he had been pursuing his idea. He had talked to a large multinational food products company with a local presence about doing his distribution. In the discussions with the large multinational, the local manager had indicated a possible interest in sourcing private labeled water from him. However, the manager who had been encouraging had now been transferred to another location and the new manager didn’t show as much interest. When asked how he intended to promote his product, which we thought would be critical to any possible success, our entrepreneur had a one-word answer, advertising.
Mpendulo and I also inquired about the planned capacity of his plant and the size of the Swazi market. His planned capacity was roughly 60 percent of the total Swazi market, but he hoped to export to Mozambique and South Africa.
While any potential investor in the United States would have quickly dismissed this proposal, TechnoServe was trying to encourage entrepreneurship in a developing country. We needed to put in the extra effort to explore any possibility. I was also new to Swaziland and didn’t want to alienate anyone. This meant that I needed to thoroughly research a proposal before giving someone the bad news that their idea just wasn’t justifiable. So Mpendulo and I planned our investigation.
Smelling the Roses
Exploring Our Surroundings and
Understanding the Culture
My opinion is that when you’ve finished your primary career and you’re working in your next phase, there is more time to smell the roses, and you should take it. Whether you’re still working for pay or volunteering, you’ve made most of the money you’re going to make in your lifetime, and you’ve had most of the career advancement. At this point in your life, you don’t need to work sixty to seventy hours per week. Forty hours of serious hard work (or less if it’s a part-time role) is just fine. For many of us who have aggressively pursued our careers for thirty years or more, this is a revelation and a challenge. But if we can take this principle to heart, work can be positively pleasurable.
When we limit the amount of time we devote to our job, we can have much more time for exploring, understanding, and appreciating our environment, especially if we’re living in another culture. This can be incredibly good fun as well as mentally stimulating. And it will help you live a longer, healthier life. Gerontologists tell us that challenging ourselves later in life with new experiences, situations, and learning will keep us more mentally sharp and physically fit than a routine without these. Wendy and I wanted to work hard for a cause, but we also wanted to take advantage of our situation and take in all that we could of the culture and sights that surrounded us. We wanted to make our time in Africa an adventure. We wanted to explore. We wanted to experience the idiosyncrasies of the local environment and culture. So we did.
At the end of only two weeks, Wendy and I knew that we really needed to have a car, so we rented one for the duration of our stay. It gave us necessary flexibility on what we could do and when, including going to the Mountain Inn at any time to use Skype and call the United States. We also had a lot more freedom to visit the local highlights. Even though we were paying for the car, our combined $50 daily stipend went pretty far in Swaziland, and we were spending much less money than we would have been in the United States. Although we now had a car, Wendy had been sick all week, so we didn’t immediately take a big trip, but we did visit the Swazi Cultural Center, primarily a reconstructed Swazi village from the nineteenth century.
Historically, the Swazi culture was male dominated (many would say that it remains so today), and polygamy was traditional. Today, few Swazi men, other than the king, have multiple wives, but some still do. In the past, polygamy was the rule rather than the exception. Men were allowed as many wives as they could afford to marry and support. The first expense was the traditional present to the future wife’s parents; seventeen cattle if the woman was a virgin. Discounts were negotiated for nonvirgins, and if the couple already had a child together, it was definite proof. After marriage, each wife had her own two huts, one for sleeping and one for cooking. The husband could decide which wife he wanted to sleep with each night. He also had his own separate hut if he wanted peace and quiet. (Some traditions die hard: Although polygamy was no longer common in Swaziland, less formal relationships continued. As mentioned earlier, unprotected sex with multiple concurrent partners was a major reason that Swaziland had the highest rate of AIDS in the world.)
After the tour of the village, we watched a performance of Swazi dancing and singing. The dancing was more athletic than most traditional dancing Wendy and I had seen in other countries, and the singing had great rhythm with multipart harmony. The performance wrapped up with a traditional rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was written by a Swazi.
Later Saturday evening, we observed a slice of current culture in Swaziland. We had been invited to go with people from our office to a local country club for dinner and a wine auction. We had no idea what to expect, but we looked forward to the opportunity to socialize with our coworkers. The country club was some distance away from Mbabane in a more rural area. Strangely, it was located adjacent to a very large canning plant for fruits and vegetables. We pulled into the dirt parking area and walked with our friends to the clubhouse.
Immediately, when we entered the clubhouse, I felt as if I was in an Elks Lodge or an American Legion Hall in a rural United States community. The floor was concrete; the ceiling was acoustical tile with commercial-style fluorescent lights. There was a fireplace that gave some ambiance, but it was overwhelmed by the rest of the slightly down-at-the-heels décor. The room was filled with tables covered with paper tablecloths and surrounded by folding chairs. The decorating committee had actually done a very nice job dressing up these tables with attractive centerpieces made of local fruits and accessories. We arrived early, so we went into the bar where a self-serve wine tasting was in progress.
The bar had similar décor except the ceiling was lower, presumably to make it cozier. We sampled a number of wines from South Africa as more people arrived. When we went back into the main dining hall, most of the tables were full, and we were immediately struck by the sea of whiteness. To put this into perspective, when walking around Mbabane, the population we saw was over 99 percent nonwhite. In fact, my experience had been that, walking down the street, white people had a tendency to stare at each other with the implied questions of, “I wonder who that is and why they are here?” At the country club dinner, the couple of mixed race background at our table had the only nonwhite faces in the room.
With further observation, the crowd seemed to fit the American Legion theme. There was a lot of white hair as well as white skin. Most people were in their fifties through seventies and looked like farmers or perhaps small businessmen from a rural community. We were in our late fifties as well, but the idea that “sixty is the new forty” hadn’t made it to Swaziland. Some of the women were nicely dressed and obviously paid attention to their appearance. However, a lot of the men had significant bellies that projected well beyond their belts. I did see two younger men, perhaps in their thirties, apparently trying to dress cool and sophisticated. They both had on informal jackets over wide open-collar shirts with pushed-up sleeves. I think the idea was to simulate the Miami Vice look, but it came off as a rumpled imitation of a style that had long been out of fashion.
My thoughts were obviously biased by the sophisticated Silicon Valley environment we had left just two weeks earlier. However, I couldn’t help but think that these people were probably Afrikaners who had migrated from South Africa with all the negative implications from the history of apartheid. Of course, when looking at me, I think most people in Swaziland guessed that I was from South Africa as well. So we all have our prejudices. I was told at a later date that most of the whites in Swaziland aren’t actually from South Africa but instead came directly from Europe. All of these people whom I had observed were probably very nice, hardworking individuals who had contributed to the economy of Swaziland. I just couldn’t ignore the stark contrasts with both Silicon Valley and the general population of Swaziland, and I felt very uncomfortable.
After we sat down at our table, the auctioneer for the evening took the podium. He was an elderly gentleman, portly, and dressed in a white shirt with a string tie. He took command and told us that the wine auction would be completed before dinner was served. We had mild trepidation since the only food on the table was bread and a small cheese plate garnished with a few vegetables. We had no idea! There were one hundred lots of wine that were auctioned off, and it took forever. I thought people would start passing out from hunger, but the auctioneer went on and on. Finally, after fifty lots, he took a break, but this only meant that dinner was further postponed. Dinner was served after 10:00 p.m. When we finally got to eat it, it was a pleasant pedestrian meal, well-done beef with mixed vegetables, potatoes, and a decent dessert.
During dinner, I got the opportunity to talk to the husband of one of my coworkers. He had a position of responsibility with the largest local bank. As we talked about the older age of the crowd at the auction, he said that seeing this demographic had become more common in the native Swazi population as well. The cause was the AIDS epidemic that was still killing off a huge proportion of Swaziland’s young adults despite the omnipresent cautionary billboards and readily available condoms. His bank had encouraged many of their retired employees to come back to work because so many of their productive younger workers had been lost to AIDS. From a larger perspective, there was serious concern that the Swazi population was evolving to a distribution with many children and adolescents (including many orphans) and a number of people over forty, but with a “hole” in the twenty to forty age group. The implications for both the business community and the society in general were ominous.
Although the AIDS epidemic threatened the country long-term, the weather had a more immediate impact on us. In general, the weather since we arrived had been very pleasant. It had been similar to northern California weather in the early spring with daytime temperatures usually approaching 70°Fahrenheit. The nights had been cool, around 50°F, which isn’t bad if your house is centrally heated, but ours wasn’t. Our cottage had small, relatively ineffective space heaters in two of the rooms. They definitely didn’t heat the house and really didn’t seem to make a difference if they were on or off. So the nights were very cold. Although we were used to having our own sleeping space in a queen-sized bed at home, compressing ourselves together in a double bed under a sheet, a blanket, the bed cover, and a quilt seemed a reasonable compromise to keep warm.
After a few weeks, the weather began to get a little warmer. Not a lot, but it was noticeable. It had definitely gotten just a little warmer at night, and on some mornings, I hadn’t worn a jacket to work. It had just turned to August, which is the equivalent of February in northern California. And like California in February, some days were actually warm if you went out in the midday and soaked in the radiant heat from the sun.
With the relatively mild and temperate weather lulling us into a sense of pleasant complacency, we weren’t prepared for the occasional intensity of Swaziland’s storms. Then we had two nights of fury. The first night, we had an amazing storm. It wasn’t a hurricane, but it came close. At dusk, the wind came up. I had never experienced wind so strong without rain. It was intense. I don’t think the winds got over seventy-five miles per hour, but I imagine it blew at fifty or sixty and carried on for several hours. Then it started to rain. The most intense rainstorms I ever experienced had always been in the tropics, but this was just as severe. The intense rain and wind continued for several hours. We could hardly sleep. Throughout the night, Wendy and I kept thinking about the forest of eucalyptus trees right next to our cottage, hoping they wouldn’t fall on us. Later, the rain stopped, but the wind kept up all night long. The early morning was calm and gave way to a beautiful day with perfectly clear air and not a cloud in the sky. Our view over the Ezulwini Valley was beautiful. We understood why it is called the Valley of Heaven.
With the previous night’s weather behind us, we went to the office. Unfortunately, we heard from the business advisor in charge of horticulture that one of her clients had his crop of baby vegetables wiped out by a hailstorm. She had visited his farm and taken pictures. The hail had been severe and had accumulated so much that it looked like snow on the ground. The localized hail didn’t cause widespread devastation, but it had totally destroyed our farmer’s crop, causing a twenty-thousand-dollar loss. Crop insurance was so expensive in Swaziland that it essentially didn’t exist, so individual farmers paid the price for the whims of nature.
The rest of our day was uneventful, and Wendy and I left the office around 6:00 p.m. The wind picked up, just like the night before. As we drove the few miles to our cottage, we began to notice that the street and traffic lights were out. We hoped that it didn’t affect our house but expected to come home to darkness. Although all the way home there were no lights on the main road, as soon as we turned into the Emafini complex, we could see glimmers of light in the distance. We had hope. As we drove over the top of the hill on our dirt and rock road, we could see the exterior lights from our cottage. We were happy. And when we scrambled into the house and closed the door, we felt we had achieved our refuge.
I began to cook dinner (while we were in Africa, I did all the cooking as Wendy created a website to keep our friends and family up to date on all of our activities) while Wendy packed for her planned trip to Johannesburg with Atiba and Leslie in the morning. The wind was really blowing again. No rain, but tree branches were being broken and blown about. And the constant roar was like a wind tunnel. The lights flickered. The television was intermittent as the reception of the satellite dish was interrupted. Just as I finished cooking and was putting dinner on the plates, the power died for good. We had dinner by candlelight. Actually, we had the modern version of dinner by candlelight and LED. Our son, who is an outdoor equipment aficionado, had convinced us to pack battery-operated LED headlamps. So we used these with the candles for dinner. How very strange; the eerie, sterile, high-tech beams from LEDs combined with the primitive, warm glow of candles. The novelty of the candlelight dinner wore off quickly.
The previous night, the winds weren’t hurricane force, but this night, I’m sure they were. They roared all night, making it impossible to stay asleep. As the wind ripped branches off the trees and smashed them against the windows, it sounded as if the panes would shatter. I worried as to what I would do if they did. Periodically, I was able to doze off until a particularly loud crash against a window would wake me again. Luckily, the windows never broke, and we survived the night.
In the morning we surveyed the damage, and it was significant. Trees were uprooted and lying everywhere. Our cottage had relatively minimal damage although a piece of the roof had been ripped off and blown away. Large branches and a broken tree, twelve inches in diameter, had fallen within ten feet of our bedroom. Our closest neighbor had a two-foot diameter tree uprooted within six feet of his house, and he had major roof damage. The exit road from our Emafini compound was blocked by a large fallen tree. We called the office to get a ride to work, but we had to climb over downed trees and branches, with Wendy’s suitcase, to get to the main road where our driver could pick us up.
Fortunately, our shower worked. We had hot water and electricity from the Emafini backup generator. Others in the office had been without power and water for two days. On the road to work, most of the traffic lights were out. Everyone who had gotten into the office had a story to tell about downed trees, blocked roads and detours, and our office Internet was down. Wendy’s trip to Johannesburg was delayed to make sure the roads were passable. We were informed that the roads were passable, but Johannesburg had gotten a rare snowfall overnight. With every bit of warm clothing she had, Wendy finally set out with her colleagues.
