New Year's Day

I did nothing on New Year’s Eve other than watch TV then try to go to bed before midnight (the first time I’ve been pathetic enough to do that). I knew I had to get up early as I’d been invited by Sharon to go with her and more of her family to visit her grandmother (known as a gogo in siSwati) who lives outside the town of Siteki. Unfortunately, people started setting off fireworks around 11:45 and kept going with the noise until after 1 am. Fireworks are legal; I even saw them for sale in the grocery stores.

Still, I got up around 6:30 am to make it to Sharon’s apartment in Manzini by 7:30. Once I arrived we hung around waiting for sister Desiree and her children (and children’s children). Desiree apparently shares Aunt Hazel’s and my father’s sense of timeliness. She’s really not concerned with punctuality. 8:00 am came and went, then 9:00, then 10:00. I was wondering why I hadn’t slept a couple more hours. Finally we got the explanation that the driver who’d been hired to take part of this big group had broken down on another, early morning job that he thought he could cram in before our trip. Finally, we headed downtown to Desiree’s apartment to wait some more. Some of the young folk in Desiree’s party – those in their teens and twenties – had been up partying most of the night, and they were at least as cranky as I was. The driver and his “van” finally showed up after noon. I’d been planning to ride in the hired van, feeling very grateful that I didn’t have to drive this time. To my surprise, a “van” here is a pickup truck; what I would call a van is a kombi. Well, I really wasn’t prepared, either mentally or wardrobe-wise, to ride for an hour and a half in the open bed of a pickup truck. The small children, however, were excited at the idea and piled in. I managed to find a seat in Desiree’s car, and Sharon squeezed into the cab of the van.

The attached photos show the children piled into the van waiting to leave Manzini and the 20 km or so of gravel road leading to the homestead.