I had come into town from my school, where I taught Woodworking and Technical Drawing, to the Peace Corps training camp, to teach my famous Sam’s Survival Session to the newest group of trainees. It was a long journey. The Swaziland bus drivers were on strike, so I had to hitchhike. I had read about a third of the paperback in my back pocket, conversed at length about cattle with some fathers walking by, and carved some new designs on my magic walking stick, (see my story The Magic Stick) while waiting at various times for a car or truck that was not full of people already, to give me a ride. It took 5.5 hours, and I barely made it in time for the 3:30 session I was scheduled to teach.
I clanked in to the dining room at the training camp with my large black backpack, stuffed with dirty laundry that I could wash in town where there was clean water, and dull woodworking tools that I needed to sharpen at the nearby technical college, and a mountain of papers that needed grading, and some food for cooking as part of the session. Tied all over the outside of my pack were my little one burner camp stove, and some pots and a pan and utensils. And my camera and binoculars. I was hot, tired, dust covered, and hungry. My right arm and the back of my neck had diesel soot on them from the smoky exhaust of a truck I had caught a ride in, from Siphofaneni to Manzini. My tennis shoes had cowpoop on them from the ride in the back of a stake truck which 3 cows had shared with me between Manzini and Mbabane.
I walked to the front of the room, leaned my pack and magic walking stick against the wall, and looked out at my class. They stared at me, and at my stick. They looked at me like I had a booger in my moustache. I looked like what a Peace Corps volunteer who hitched in from out in the bush would look like. They looked like cherubs to me. Their faces and clothes were so clean. Their shoes were new. I remembered that only a couple years ago, I too, had looked like that. They looked so innocent.
“Sanibonani bonkhosi!” (Hello honored ones!) I greeted them loudly. “My name is Maseko.”
“Sanibonani babe,” (Hello father) they all replied kind of listlessly, in unison. I almost laughed. It was the 9th week of a 10 week training program, and they were so burnt out from the weeks of language lessons, and practice teaching, and other lessons in a myriad of subjects. I knew the feeling.
I whipped the paperback out of my back pocket quickly, and held it up, and as I started my survival session, I said, “Books! DON’T leave home without them!” It was always my first lesson of the session. Most of the time spent on journeys to anywhere in Swaziland, were either waiting for a ride on the side of the dirt road, when hitching, or sitting in a too-small seat in a hot crowded cast-off elementary school bus with dust blowing in the open windows. Books kept you sane.
The session went well. I managed to keep everyone’s attention for the whole hour and a half, because I am animated, a good teacher, and my lessons are full of humor. And I cooked them delicious stir fries and rice to pass around and sample, while I talked. I noticed Max, an ex-volunteer who “went native” after his term of service expired and stayed there living in the bush, slip into a seat in the back. When I was done with the session, and the trainees had gone off to get ready for dinner, Max and I walked outside.
Max: Good session, Sam. Even I learned some new things.
Me: Thanks Max, How ya doing?
Max: I am doing great. I want to ask you a favor.
Me: Ok, shoot.
Max: I was just at the Sangoma school about a mile up the road towards town, visiting the grandmother who runs it. She saw you walk by and asked me about you. She noticed your stick. She wants to meet you.
I had not known that there was a sangoma school. I guess they have to learn it somewhere. A sangoma is what some people call a witch doctor. Sangomas made spells for those who wanted them. They used herbs, and magic fetishes, and had red clay in their hair, and were kind of feared yet respected by the populace. Do I want to visit a sangoma school? Does the King have toilets with running water? Heck yeah!
We walked out of the gate of the training camp, and down the road a piece, and up a path to a scruffy looking homestead. A homestead is a cluster of mud huts with grass roofs, where extended families lived. I had been to many scruffy homesteads out around my school, visiting parents of my students. I lived way out in the bush. There was a lot of poverty. But this homestead was particularly scabrous and tumbledown. There were youngish people with red clay in their hair sitting around fires or walking here and there.
We went over to the biggest hut and “knocked on the door”. We didn’t actually knock. In Swaziland you never bang on a house because it stirs up the evil spirits. You stand about 4 feet from the door, and say “Ncon, Ncon!” (knock knock) or say “Eh Ekhaya!” (hello to the house), and wait, and if anybody is home, they will come out. A tiny wizened grandmother came outside, and Max greeted her, and she hugged him. Then he introduced me. She greeted me, and we did the usual small talk that people do, so that they can take your measure. Max was fluent in siSwati. Mine was ok for greetings and small things, but not up to conversing in depth. Max started translating for me, so I would be sure to follow what was going on.
Max: The grandmother wants to know if you would be willing to throw a tarot card reading for her, in return for her throwing the bones for you. She has never heard of tarot cards and is very interested. And she wants to look at your stick, if you will let her.
Max had seen me reading tarot cards for some folks, and must have mentioned it to her. I taught myself tarot card reading back when I was on my journey to rediscover myself after my wife Jenny had died. I don’t claim to be an expert or a witch doctor. I mostly read my own cards in times when I am stuck on something in my life and need to clarify my thinking. I don’t care what it is that people want to know from the reading when I read for others. I don’t even ask. I just have them hold the cards, think about what they wish to know, and then I throw a celtic cross spread, and tell the story that the cards reveal. It is up to the other person to decide what to do with the story I tell. I have done it enough that the stories are fairly easy for me to put together as I look over the throw. In my bag where I keep my cards, there is also a really tattered taped-together copy of Eden Gray’s Mastering the Tarot, and in a pinch, I can look up something that is not clear to me. The cards each have a picture, which means something, and the position on the layout, and if it is upside down or right side up, tells you what it applies to. Throwing the bones is basically the same thing, but with bones instead of cards. A method of divination.
Would I trade her a tarot reading for a chance to see a real live sangoma throw the bones for me? Hahahaha, OMG heck yeah, please! She smiled toothlessly, and invited us in. The hut was dark, like they always are until your eyes adjust, and had random things hanging from the walls, and a small fire in the center of the dirt floor. We sat down on the ground around the fire. Even at 40, I could still sit cross legged for a couple hours with no problem. She dragged a large snakeskin out of the corner, and a small box. Evidently she was going first. She took off her shirt, and draped the snakeskin around her bony shoulders and withered breasts. She started chanting. After a minute, she opened the little box, and took out what looked like a pint of whiskey, and a bag of powdered dry leaves and a small leather bag, tied at the top. While maintaining the chanting, she held the pint bottle up over her head, then unscrewed the top, and took several healthy glugs from it, and put the top back on, and the bottle back in the box.
Still chanting, she pulled out a small pipe, put some of the powdered leaves in it, and took a small twig from the fire, and sparked the pipe up. She took 3 or 4 puffs of it, and put the pipe back in the box. It was marijuana, I could smell the smoke. She went on chanting for 4 or 5 minutes, and all of a sudden, she seemed to change. Her voice got deeper and louder, she sat up much straighter, and seemed to grow in stature. The grandmother picked up the small leather bag, and chanting, moved it from hand to hand. Then she untied the top, and shook the contents of the bag out on the floor.
There were a couple chicken bones, among them the wishbone. There were two colored pieces of broken plastic, one red and one blue. There was a piece of green glass. A short piece of metal wire. A beer bottle cap. A piece of some kind of tree bark. Two smooth crooked sticks. A small piece of hide with short brown hair on one side. Some sort of claw, maybe from a rooster. A small yellow tooth. A tiny feather. They were jumbled in a pile.
She started telling the story. Max was translating. This means such and such. Because this one is touching this other one, it means this. This one is on end so it means that. She poked at the pile of stuff, and pointed out relationships between things. She told me about my past, and my present, and trouble I should avoid, my marital status and what would happen to that, and what I could expect in the future. The stuff about my past and present she could not have known before, and it was remarkably accurate. I can’t be more specific because if you ever repeat what a sangoma tells you to anyone, you bring a spate of bad luck to both you and them. And I don’t need none of that. I got enough already.
Grandmother sort of jerked, and shrunk back to her tiny self, took off the snakeskin and put her shirt back on, put the stuff back in the bag, the bag in the box, and all the stuff back in the corner. Then she looked at me and nodded her head. Ok, my turn. As I went outside to my pack, leaning against her house with my magic stick, I thought about if I should try to be magical when I did her reading. She had gone into a trance for me, Did I owe her that? I decided no. I should just be straight up with her. My magic was in the telling. I took my cards out and returned into the hut.
When I took the cards out of the box, she exclaimed in delight because they have very colorful pictures on them. She asked to see them, so I handed them to her. Without saying a word, she looked through the cards at all the pictures. She was smiling. She squared them all up, bowed her head to me, and handed them back. I shuffled the deck 5 or 6 times, and put them down in front of her. I asked, through Max, if she would cut the deck, put the cut on the bottom, and hold them in both of her hands, and close her eyes, and silently tell the cards what she wished to know. She held them for like 5 minutes. She must have wanted to know something big. Then she handed them back.
I threw a spread of 10 cards. I started to tell her her story, but she held up her hand until she had studied the layout thoroughly. When she nodded, I looked over the layout and started telling what I saw there. She asked a lot of questions, and kept Max hopping on the two way translations. I won’t tell you what her story was because tarot stories are very personal, and not anybody else’s bidness. She was fascinated by the cards and the story. She was a smart grandmother. Her questions showed me her grasping of the story I was telling and how I saw that from a card. When I finished my story, she asked to see the unused part of the deck, and went through it, pulling out a few cards here and there, and asking the meaning of them. Then she put the cards together and squared them up, and bowed her head as she handed them back to me. I shuffled them a couple times, and put them back in their taped up box, and we went outside, and I put them back in my pack.
Grandmother invited Max and I to eat with them, and we said yes. I was still hungry from this afternoon. We sat around a bigger fire with many of the students at her school, some of which had gone to public school and spoke English. They brought us some roasted meat, a blob of porridge, and the ubiquitous ligusha. (see my story Ligusha.) I felt very welcome. They asked to see my stick, and when they saw that I would let them touch it, passed it around and everybody looked at it and asked me lots of questions about it. I got the opportunity to ask everything I had always wanted to know about sangomas. Why and how did they put the clay in their hair? How long was school there? How do you find a place that needs a sangoma? Was there specialization? How much did they charge for their services in making spells? I learned that if I had not had tarot to exchange, then the bone throwing would have cost two chickens because I was a white man, and harder to divine for. If I would have asked for a spell, it would have cost one goat. For a spell to make a Swazi girl fall in love with me and give me many fat children, 3 goats or a small cow. That is how sangomas make a living.
After a totally delightful evening, it was getting late, and Max and I thanked them, and the grandmother, and took our leave. We walked down the road in the dark, and I went to the Peace Corps hostel and took a hot bath in clean clear water that you could see through! Yay! Then I sat down and graded papers for an hour, using bright electric light! OMG, sooooo much better than candlelight which I used out at my school. Could a day be better than this one?
I was truly a lucky boy. I felt like life was ultra groovy and sweet.
Adventure awaits anyone willing to step out of their comfort zone. You just gotta do it.
I love the choice of living. 
I am a chico afortunado.