Bad Days

I woke up on the wrong side of the
bed. Literally. When it’s really hot outside the sun shines straight in through
the window behind my bed, making me sweat uncontrollably. For some reason,
maybe because of the sweat, maybe because of the sun light, flies are attracted
to my face on those mornings. They not only buzz around my head making that
obnoxious noise, but they constantly land on my lips, my eyes, my nose. I can
feel them moving their little legs around on my sweat covered skin and it
drives me crazy. I cannot emphasize enough how annoying it is. The minute the
sun comes up, which is around 5 here, they swarm me. I am no longer able to
sleep because 1) I’m furious at the flies, and 2) In a delirious attempt to get
them to go away I swat at them, slapping myself in the face in the process. So
this particular morning I had decided to try and trick the flies by flipping
around so that my head lay where my feet usually were. It was ineffective. They
continued to plague me, robbing me of two good hours of sleep.

Therefore, I was exhausted on top
of being angry at every fly that ever existed. Not a good way to start the day.
In the morning the rest of my teammates went to a care point and I stayed
behind because I had business to do with PG. For some reason though, those
plans fell though and I was left to play with the kids at the care point at our
house. It was okay, but just that, okay. My bad mood persisted. After lunch we
went to go do home visits and to be quite honest I did not want to go. I wanted
to continue in my selfish bad mood for the rest of the day and sit around and
not do much of anything. But here I was sitting on the ground at this old
woman’s house in the unbearable heat trying to work through the language
barrier and get to know her.

Her name is Betty and lives with
her son and two granddaughters. She’s in a wheelchair because she has diabetes
and had to have her foot amputated. Getting around on the bumpy dirt roads is
more than difficult for her, it’s early impossible. The two little girls are named Sphay and Simpiwe,
and they’re 2 and 3, not to mention absolutely precious. Sphay had been eyeing
me the whole time we were there, making faces at me, but too afraid to come and
play. After a little while though she ran over and jumped into my lap. She was
wearing this pink lace dress that looked like it was once an American girl’s
party dress. It was covered in red dirt, torn, and the zipper didn’t work. But
you could tell she felt so pretty in it, even though she wore it every day. As
we played, my bad mood started to melt away. We were in the shade and there was
a nice breeze. The sky was blue blue blue and I swear the grass really is greener in
Swaziland. I had a little girl in my lap, life couldn’t really be much better.

Then she started to sing. At first
it was just gibberish, and I laughed and repeated whatever she was saying. She
thought it was a fun game and kept singing her nonsense. I started to notice
that it was the same syllables over and over again though and thought she was
maybe saying something in SiSwati. The sounds started to come together and I
was saying it without even realizing it for a few minutes. Then it hit me- she
was singing “Hallelujah” over and over again.