Siyabonga

I first glimpsed him one day as I was walking through one of the hospital wards -- just a flash of a young boy's smile behind a closing door as I passed, a big toothy grin that made me smile too. A week later I noticed him again, same big smile, worn by a boy of around twelve years old, who was also wearing a blue hospital gown. I greeted him as I passed by: "Unjani, bhuti?" (How are you, brother?) "I'm fine," he responded in English as he kept walking the other way. Evidently we both had places to go and people to see.

From then on I saw him often around the hospital hanging out in his hospital gown. He was always in good spirits and seemed energetic and full of life. It was clear the hospital staff -- nurses, doctors, and orderlies -- liked him too. He was clearly a favored patient. One day I asked him his name. "Siyabonga," he said, which means "we thank you." I asked him why he was in the hospital, and he simply said "I'm staying here." That sort of vague answer is not uncommon, and I assumed he must not know or understand his diagnosis and that he was a long-term patient being treated in one of the wards. Whenever I saw him I'd say hello and have a brief chat, always exactly the same: "How are you?" "I am fine." "Sharp!" (pronounced more like "shop!"). Sharp is the all-purpose word of approval used by boys and young men here, sort of like "cool" is used in the U.S.

Scott got to know Siyabonga as well, and one day he came home from the hospital and said "You know that boy Siyabonga with the big smile? He's not actually a patient at the hospital -- he's been abandoned there." It turns out that Siyabonga had come into the hospital several months before with his sick mother. Siyabonga was sick himself with some relatively mild malady, for which he received treatment and was quickly cured, but his mother had died soon thereafter of T.B. They lived a long distance from the hospital, and no other family member ever showed up to claim Siyabonga or his mother's body. After making some rudimentary efforts to locate some of his relatives, the hospital eventually buried his mother in a pauper's grave, and allowed Siyabonga to stay on at the hospital indefinitely, sleeping in a bed in the male ward. Siyabonga said he didn't want to go back home anyway; there was no one there who wanted him, and we later learned from one of the nurses that he told her he'd been beaten and abused at home. He always wore a hospital gown because the only the clothes he had were the ones he walked in with, and the hospital had no other boy's clothes of his size.

Maybe it's an indication of how much we've grown used to such sad cases that even after learning Siyabonga's story, we made no special efforts to help him. Of course, I continued to greet him and to feel happy at seeing his smile, while simultaneously feeling a little tug at my heart for his strange life as a ward of the hospital.

One day, about a month ago, Scott and I happened to be in the administrative wing together. Sitting on a bench outside the personnel director's office was Siyabonga, wearing new street clothes with a small grocery bag containing the few possessions he'd gathered since coming to the hospital. He was clearly going somewhere. "What's going on, bhuti?" we asked. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know," he shrugged. The look on his face was scared, brave, and excited all at once, and his smile quivered a bit.

"We'll find out for you," we told him as we headed into the personnel office.

The very good news was that he was being sent to Bulembu, the city of orphans I've written about previously. But I couldn't help feeling sad for this young boy when we went back out in the hall to tell him where he was going. As we explained to him what Bulembu was, and told him not to worry, that he'd be happy and well-taken care of there, I thought to myself what a strange, hurt existence this boy has already had: to leave his home with his sick mother, to watch her die in the hospital, to have no family to claim him or to return to, to live for months in a hospital ward surrounded by sick and dying people, and then to be moved again to place filled with other lost children like himself -- what sense of stability, or human relationships, or love must he have?

And yet his face is rarely without a big smile -- that brave, excited, cocky smile we've all seen on the faces of boys the world over. His smile endures without the things that bring smiles to the faces of other young boys. Scott and I walked him to the social services van that was to take him to Bulembu. As he drove off, he waved at us from the back window. His smile was bigger than ever. Siyabonga, young man.

Swazi Houses

These pictures should give you a good idea of the different types of Swazi homes we see every day. The poorest Swazis, who comprise a good percentage of the population, build their homes of mud, rocks, sticks, and reeds. Those who can afford to, build with bricks and cement, although as you can see, not always of the best quality.
(Click on photos to enlarge.)

Thabiso loses a shoe

On the surface this little tale may seem entirely insignificant, but it exemplifies in a concrete way the heightened importance of things we would hardly think about in the United States, and the complexities involved in resolving even small problems here.

About six or seven weeks ago, when Thabiso was still living with his aunt, I ran into his teacher one day in town, and she mentioned to me that Thabiso had not been in school that day. He'd had a perfect attendance record ever since we'd insisted on him going to school as a condition of his being able to visit us. So later that day I called his aunt to see if she knew why he hadn't been to school. "Oh yes," she told me, "his shoes don't fit him anymore. They are too painful to wear, but the school will send him away if he doesn't have shoes." I recalled seeing his feet squeezed into a pair of shoes he'd probably had for a couple of years -- a long time for a growing boy -- so after I picked up Scott at the hospital that afternoon, we took Thabiso into town to buy a new pair of shoes. He got the basic black leather lace-up dress shoes which are a part of all school-boys' uniforms here. The shoes cost about 155 rand ($22) -- very expensive for many families here.

Thabiso went back to school the next day proudly wearing his new shoes, and we considered the problem solved. It would seem that the story would end there, but nothing is ever that simple here. About ten days ago, Thabiso showed up "to greet us" one afternoon. It seemed as if something was on his mind, and eventually he told us that one of his new shoes had been stolen. He fingered his erstwhile friend and partner in crime, Senzo, as the culprit. "But why would Senzo steal just one shoe?" I asked. Thabiso just shrugged and insisted that Senzo had stolen his shoe one night when they were at a mutual friend's home watching their current favorite movie "Spiderman" on DVD. (The mechanics and intricacies of how they manage to watch these bootleg DVD's on homesteads with no electricity will have to wait for another entry (it involves a car battery). The thought of these kids having "movie nights" together amused my mother no end while she was visiting. The reach of American pop culture is truly astounding.)

In any case, once movie night was over, Thabiso discovered that one of his shoes was missing (the Swazis remove their shoes and leave them at the door before entering someone's home). One of the other kids said they'd seen Senzo making off with the shoe, so he immediately became the prime suspect. Senzo gets blamed for lots of things that go missing or get broken around here -- some of it deservedly so, but at other times he gets blamed simply because he's already got a reputation as a trouble maker. By the time Thabiso told us about his missing shoe, a couple of days had passed. Neither Scott nor I were inclined to run out and buy him another pair of shoes. Scott went as far as going to visit the homestead where Thabiso had been watching movies the night his shoe went missing. He talked to the mother of the home, as well as several of the children who'd been there that night, and he had the brilliant idea of offering a reward (10 rand, about $1.30) for the missing shoe. On the way home, he ran into Senzo, who vehemently denied stealing the shoe, but Scott wisely offered him the same reward if he should come across the shoe.

Scott and I shared a laugh that night at the thought of these kids scouring the neighborhood for a missing shoe. Thabiso hobbled to school for the next week or so in his old tight shoes, and I seriously doubted his missing new shoe would ever show up. But this past Saturday, I ran into Senzo waiting on the road that leads to Mabuda Farm, and he told me that he knew where the shoe was: he didn't have it, but it was back at the home where they'd all been watching movies the fateful night the shoe disappeared. One of the kids at that homestead had found the shoe and was ready to claim the reward. The only problem was, the family was away and the shoe was locked up inside their home. Senzo promised to come and get us when the shoe was available to be claimed.

The next night, Sunday, Senzo showed up at our door to lead us to the shoe. As it happened, Thabiso was there as well for his daily visit "to greet us." Scott bundled both of them into our car and took off into the dusk in search of the shoe. He returned a short while later, minus the two boys, but with a smile of success on his face. He'd given rewards to both Senzo and the boy who'd found the shoe. He'd then taken Thabiso home to make sure the shoe was a perfect match for the one he still had, and it was. We both hope that this Swazi school-boy Cinderella story is truly at an end, but don't be surprised if there's a sequel. You never know around here...