Today was the day to visit a Swazi school – Siteki Nazarene School – and to talk to one of the sponsored students of the Girl Child Education fund. Education of girls is hugely important; it lowers teenage pregnancy rates and improves the lifetime reproductive health of females, empowers women in relationships and means that they are less likely to suffer violence at home, and improves their chances of earning their own income being financially independent in their relationship.
I met Nomfundo Mamba who was 17 years old and whose ambition it was to be a veterinary nurse. She was doing well at school, in particular in agriculture and biology. Her brother , also her guardian, would be furious if she jeopardised her schooling by falling pregnant, she told us, and anyway she was enjoying her studies and would consider childbearing much later on in her life, and definitely after marriage.
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Nomfundo was very grateful for her opportunities via the Girl Child Education Fund of the International Council of Nurses. She showed us around her school – a boarding school for the most part – with single-sex dormitories and classrooms per academic year group with blackboards at the front of each. The girls studied harder than the boys, she told us!
Tiny Dlamini, who was accompanying us, had also managed to organise a visit for Becky and I to a rural village not far from Siteki, so that we could visit a pregnant woman at her home and complete our picture of the journey of a patient from a typical rural homestead to clinic to hospital. And so we met 17 year old Petzile, 7 months pregnant, and her extended family:
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Petzile’s typical day, in contrast to Nomfundo’s day of studying, involved trekking 3 times to the river 30 minutes walk away to find water, household chores of cleaning, cooking and making the local alcoholic brew to sell, and looking after other found children living in the same village.
I tried my hand at stirring the local brew – a very stiff and strong smelling liquid:
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Petzile was somewhat regretful about her education; she had left as a young teenager because of a lack of funds. She hadn’t been planning a pregnancy but she was happy enough. Her boyfriend was away working; the nearest clinic for pregnancy care was 2 1/2 hours away by walking and local taxi – that was on a good day. She had kept all of her appointments so far but wasn’t really sure how she would travel in labour. Her grandmother, Gogo Mazilla, had some ideas. I got the impression she had left a little sum of money aside for when the time came.
The matriarch of the village was Petzile’s great-aunt. She was in high spirits and was dancing away to the music on the radio of our car:
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She insisted I took one of the reed mats made in the village:
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Those were wonderful scenes of exchange and kindness.
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Too soon we were back on the dirt road that Petzile would take in labour, which became tarred as we reached Siteki and then drove onto Mbabane.
