Mirror, mirror

It’s a full month now on the other side of the globe. One month, that started with landing in the middle of country where the cars are riding on the left side of the road, where you have the smell of warm maize on street corners, where you can easily burn your elbows even when adding SPF50+ sun protection cream every other hour, where roads don’t have names, where public transportation doesn't take off before being full of travellers and where you can find scorpions and snakes inside your house. 

The feeling when you are the only white person in the middle of a huge crowd of dark-skinned people and getting attention only because of this fact is something that makes me think that we human beings truly are creatures that wish to be part of group. In our words and actions, it needs bravery to think and do differently, to disagree. It is in human nature hard to stand alone against group of people. Being on a spot light all the time, whether I choose or not to, is a challenge.

But because skin colour as well as propably many other characters, are something that I cannot choose, it also makes me think there are many ways we human beings are unique. Every human being is beautiful. Everyone deserves to be treated respectfully and lovingly. Some young Swazi kids come more or less bravely to touch my skin just for the pure wander of it's colour.

At the same time, we human beings have many things in common. We all use our present knowledge to base our actions upon. We just come from different cultural backgrounds and ways of approaching things. We can still understand each other if we are flexible, open and interested of the background of the other statement. I have experienced a sense of community in the university of Swaziland, in the Raleigh Fitkin Memorial Hospital, in the church and even when travelling in the combi.

Every day has been an adventure, I have never knew in the morning all the events that the day will bring along. Today we had for instance a Fairewell party celebration for 6 American nursing students and their professor who had came to learn Swazi nursing for 2 weeks with lots of food, Swazi costumes, sharing the experiences of the short introduction to Swaziland and hospital staff sang an outstanding beautiful song as a choir with 2 voices. I haven't so far met a Swazi who couldn't sing. And in the evening we wanted to make pancakes with my two lovely danish housemates, who came one week ago, but we remembered we can't when we don't have any eggs. Luckily we realized to ask from the hospital restaurant, from where the friendly chefs gave us a full bag of eggs on top of all for free and then we invited a local Nazarene University student ,who we met in the restaurant, to join our pancake party. Therefore in the end, we had a very cozy evening and we heard interesting stories of Swaziland such as the nature remedies and believes in witchcraft.