I was sitting one night in my teachers quarters house, doing my Peace Corps best to get all my students tests graded, so I could leave and travel somewhere during the upcoming two week break between semesters. It was going slowly. I had 3 candles stuck to my table in my room, with the woodworking tests nestled into the middle of them. Grading by candlelight is difficult, especially on papers by students who wrote lightly with their pencils. And 3 times I had leaned forward to see the writing more closely, and stuck my hair into one of the candle flames. I had short hair, so my head did not burst into a bonfire, but it sizzled and smelled awful. This was nothing new. I had burnt my hair so often grading papers by candlelight, that when it actually caught fire, I would just reach up absently, and smack the fire out with my hand, and keep right on grading papers.
It was hot. My room temperature, according to my post card thermometer that someone had sent me, taped to my wall, was showing the brown band, so it was between 95 and 100 degrees. I couldn’t open my window to get some breeze because a million moths would fly in and flap themselves to death in the candle flames. I was sitting in just jockey shorts, sweating on the plastic chair.
All of a sudden there was a bang on the glass of my window, like someone had tossed a small stone at it. I looked up, but it was dark, and I couldn’t see outside. I shrugged, and went back to grading. Only two more classes of tests to grade and I could climb up into my platform bed that I had built for myself about 5 feet off the floor, and get some shuteye under my mosquito net. Another bang on the glass, and a couple clangs on my metal roof. Was someone out there throwing stones at my house?
I stood up and leaned close to my window, trying to see into the darkness. Bang! Bang! Bangbangbang! And all of a sudden there were many clangs hitting my roof. I saw a hailstone hitting the glass. And then, a total inundation of hail coming down with great force. So many hailstones were hitting my window that I jumped back in alarm, fearing that the glass was going to break. It increased in volume, and in 15 seconds the sound of hailstones was as if a thousand cows were dancing on my roof. It became so powerful that I could feel the vibrations of it through my bare feet on the floor. Holy crap! It was very loud, and in the cacophony of the hail, which now had become the sound of a freight train, I watched the posters taped to my wall vibrate the tape off of the cement surface, and fall gently to the floor. I ran out to my kitchen door, on the leeward side of my house, and opened it up and looked outside. Hail was covering everything. In the intermittent flashes of lightning from the storm, I could see that the other teachers houses were covered with white hailstones, as was the ground, and it kind of looked like a Currier and Ives Christmas card, all wintery.
I ran back to my bedroom, and grabbed my camera and flash, and my tripod, and ran back to the kitchen and set it up in the doorway. I charged the flash and took a picture. The hail was still pounding down, and it was about 2 inches deep on the ground and the roofs. So I recharged my flash, set my camera timer to 10 seconds, took a deep breath, and leaped down off my porch and ran about 30 feet out into my yard, turned around, held up my arms with my fists and teeth clenched, and waited for the timer to shoot the picture. Hailstones the size of marbles were pounding the top of my head and my arms. It hurt. C’mon flash, go off!
Finally the flash of white light and I could run back inside. Just in that short a time, the hail had become 4 inches deep and I slogged through it going back in. The hail was still coming down in buckets. I was shivering. I reset the camera and flash, and again took a deep breath, leaped out into the storm and ran out into it, and turned around posing for the picture. It was coming down even harder, and as I waited for the flash to go off, blinking from the hailstones smashing against my skull, I realized that I was standing outside. In my tighty whitey jockey shorts. Holding my arms above my head. In a lightning storm. In the middle of the teachers quarters. At night. With a bright flash to attract anybody looking out their window from one of the other houses to see me. Naked except for my jockey shorts.
Just as the flash went off, a big boom of thunder, and a huge bolt of lightning struck down in the bushveld right behind the teachers quarters compound. As I raced back into my house, the hail was almost up to my knees, and I had to wade thru it like mud.
Lightning struck close again, so I came to my senses, and quickly closed my door, and went and found a towel to dry off. Priceless pictures! I couldn’t wait to get them developed! The worst hailstorm I ever saw.
It continued for about 10 minutes. When it finally tapered off and stopped, there was about a foot of hailstones on everything. I put on some dry jockey shorts, and got back to grading papers.
I got up about sunrise the next morning, went into the kitchen, made a cup of Joe on my little gas stove, grabbed my camera, and walked down to the school. It must have been a tornado because the entire roof of the 10 classroom primary school had ripped off the building whole, and had flown over and landed in the middle of the soccer pitch. There was slushy ice about 6 inches deep everywhere. Every tree in the bushveld around the school was completely denuded of leaves, and everything else, the fields of corn, the community garden, were beaten totally down to the ground. It looked like an apocalypse.
When I got down to the high school and my woodshop, I saw that the ice had slid off the roof, creating 6 foot tall dunes of ice all around the perimeter, blocking all the sidewalks between the three buildings. I took lots of pictures. The students were starting to show up, and were leaping and playing on the dunes of hailstones. Most of them had probably never seen ice before. The melting ice made a river of water, running into my woodshop doorway, and across the floor and out the back door. School was an hour late getting started that day.
Talking to the students who came to my classes that day, I learned that the huts of the homesteads with grass roofs, had been completely torn asunder. There were dead goats and chickens all over. A couple people from the community had died from the hail. By the end of the day, the ice had all melted.
The next morning walking down to school, I saw that the soccer pitch, with the primary school roof right in the middle of it, which had previously been a dusty bare dirt field, was completely covered in little pink flowers which had sprung up overnight. Nature is so amazing.
Later that week, my friend Siphiwe, a teacher in the primary school, came over to my house and sat on my bench with me. She looked at me and smiled, and said, “Hey, Maseko, what is behind the crazy story going around that people saw you calling down lightning into your fists while standing in the ice storm in your underpants? Are you a sangoma?” (witch doctor) “Yes, Siphiwe,” I replied, “It was me,and I was making a magic spell so I could find a Swazi girl to marry me and give me many fat babies.”
A couple days later I went into town to start my break between semesters. I dropped my film off at the “Quick Foto” to be developed. It wasn’t very quick. The film had to be sent 360km to Johannesburg, and developed there, and then sent back to Mbabane. It took about two weeks. I traveled to Mozambique for my vacation, and when I got back to Mbabane, I went in to the Quick Foto to reclaim my pictures. I was so excited to see them. But when I asked for them, the guy said, “I am sorry, Mr. Maseko, but your pictures have gone missing. But my manager said I could give you a free roll of film with our apologies.” Great. Award winning pictures gone. Like that. I am sure the lab guy saw the pictures of this crazy white guy in his panties holding up his fists in a lightning storm, and decided to keep them to show his friends.
For those times when you do something really dumb 