I was at a
soccer game. My friends Felape and Mdeny were hanging out with Jess and I on
the sidelines watching. Felape, Mdeny's older brother, jokingly took his hat
and said "Look at this! It belongs in the rubbish. You should throw it in the
rubbish!" He was referring to the fact that it was held together by a safety
pin. "Ish!" yelled Mdeny, grabbing his hat back, "This is a nice hat. You see
what it says on the back? Billabong. This means money." He stuffed it back on
his head and we went back to watching the game. 

I pretended
like nothing was wrong, but on the inside my heart was breaking. Mdeny is one
of my favorite Swazis. He's 16 and has one of the most genuinely kind hearts
I've ever encountered. He has this enormous, contagious smile. His mother
Salina has eight kids. The youngest is only four. Their family is quite poor.
He's not stuck up, or materialistic. He is simply a product of what I've come
to term "modern poverty". In our world, the poor know what they're missing out
on. Technology has spread wide enough to show people like Mdeny what rich looks
like, what money looks like. Not everyone in Swazi is poor. There are those who
have money. They're plastered all over the newspapers here, wearing their
designer clothes. Music videos that play on the few TVs here show people diving
in huge SUVs with shiny silver rims, just like in America. In Manzini there are
people who live in mansions, not one roomed huts with straw roofs. There's also
a mall in Manzini, and it's filled with advertisements of young, well dressed
and clean people who are happy because they shopped at Mr. Price, a place
that's insanely cheap by US standards but entirely unaffordable to the average
16 year old from Nsoko. These kids are living in some of the worst conditions
in the world, and yet they're in a world that advertises wealth like it's the
norm.

How else are
they supposed to feel, but that they're worthless? So they save up, somehow,
for one Billabong hat that will make it seem like they do have some kind of
money. Meanwhile, their mom doesn't have money to pay for food, let alone the
school fees so that they can get an education. You can call it irresponsible
all day long, but as I sit in the face of it, all it does is break my
heart. I want to scream in their faces,
"I love you, even if you don't wear nice clothes or have a cell phone or drive
a car!" but instead I perpetuate the problem by wearing a different shirt every
day of the week. I hide the fact at home I have a bed with white sheets and I
take a shower every day. I fail to mention that I have my own room in a house
that has electricity and two bathrooms. I would never dream of telling them
that I have a closet literally filled with different clothes.