I mentioned this story in my previous story below about The Skinniest Pig In All Of Mexico. Now I will tell it.

After a year and a half or so, living at my school in the teachers quarters, Musa, a man who taught carpentry in the nearby Adult Education Center invited me to move out and live with him and his family on their homestead. I had been looking for this opportunity for a while. I had briefly lived with a Swazi family, the Maseko family, for 10 days during training, and they gave me my name. Sipho Maseko. Gift to the Maseko family, it meant. I bore their name proudly, but when posted, my school was at the opposite end of the country, a good days worth of riding and waiting for buses. So I didn’t see them often, but that 10 days had opened my eyes to how the folks among which I was gonna live were living, and I liked the simplicity of life with them a lot. So when Musa invited me to live with his family, I jumped at the chance.

I was sort of treated like a grandfather there, and at 40, if I were a Swazi, I surely would have been. Musa assigned his 11 year old daughter, Ncamsile, to keep an eye on me, and keep me out of trouble. A kind of young mentor. She took to the job with gusto, and before long, she was bossing me around, and coming to my hut every night to eat dinner with me, and do her homework. We became great friends.

I had a big box, in which I was keeping the items that my stateside friends would send me, because they knew I was suffering (NOT) living in a mud hut in the middle of the bush. Things like Kraft Mac and Cheese, and tangy italian style spaghetti. And instant pudding. Pop tarts. M&M’s. Cereal, instant oatmeal. Cookies. I was good about saving those things, and the box was chock full of stateside food stuff. Each evening after her familial chores, Ncamsile would bring her homework over, and we would make dinner. Usually, the mothers would be making the porridge down in the family kitchen, and Nca and I would make something in my hut, and I would put two servings of whatever we cooked, on two plates, and send the rest of it with Nca down to the kitchen, and she would give it to the mothers, and return with two plates with a big blob of porridge on each. That was the staple there, porridge, made from ground white maize. Tastless yet glutinous. Like eating that paste you use in papier mache.

When it came time to cook, Ncamsile would go to the big box of Masekos mysterious food, and pick out what we were going to make. She would pick out some random thing, and read all sides of the box, and look at the pictures on it, while giving a running discussion on what she was reading, and then she would make it, with a little coaching from me. One night it was Royal Instant Chocolate pudding. She read the instructions, and took out my Carnation Instant milk, and made the required amount, and added the pudding mix, and stirred it up, and took a spoonful, and tasted it, It was runny, like chocolate milk, which she had never had before, and she pronounced it delicious.

Me: It is not done yet, Nca.

Nca: I followed the directions Maseko. What more is there?

Me: I have to put some American magic in it, and then it will be finished.

And I wiggled my fingers over the bowl, and made magical sounds, and said, “it must rest for a minute, That was powerful magic.” And I winked at her. She was a smart girl, and could tell when I was messing with her, but being an obedient daughter, she said “ok.” and got her homework back out, and we talked about Long Division for about 15 minutes.

After that, I told her to serve us up some, and take the rest to the mothers, and bring back our porridge. She went to the bowl and got out two small glasses to pour the pudding into, and it wouldn’t pour. She shook it a little, but it just stuck quivering in the bowl. I laughed.

Me: you must use s spoon to serve it, Nca.

Nca: What is this!? Has your magic spoiled it?

Me: No, that is how we Americans like our chocolate pudding.

So, she served out two blobs, and went down to the kitchen with the rest. I never knew what went on when she would arrive in the kitchen, a stick hut with a firepit in the middle of the floor where they boiled the porridge, with some dish that nobody had ever seen before. I imagined her animated discussion with the mothers, telling what she had read on the box, and what strange foods came out of it. Men were not invited into the kitchen hut.

One night Ncamsile had news to tell me. Sydney, the oldest brother, and her father were both Boy Scouts, and were inviting me to go to the yearly camporee with them the next weekend. Cool. I had loved scouting when I was younger.

The camporee was far in the north of the country, and I got there on friday about 3 pm, after spending the morning in the peace corps office, working on the grants that I was writing for rebuilding 3 preschools damaged in a cyclone a couple years before. There were a half a dozen men and women at the campsite, getting ready to prepare the nights meal for the 300 boys, who were down at the sports field having competitions. I walked up and introdcued myself to the adults. They put me to work helping build the fires on which we were going to cook. We were going to cook in huge three legged cast iron pots, like you see in the cartoons where cannibals are cooking the missionaries, but a little smaller.

While some women were getting the porridge boiling, I noticed a cow tied to a tree over by the fence. There was a man standing there, so I went over to see what he was doing. He was in the traditional garb, and standing there, with a traditional Swazi spear. One of the fathers came over to me, and told me that the King had donated a beast from his royal herd, and it was to be what they fed the hungry boys, and they had paid this man to come and kill the cow in the traditional Swazi way. He was talking softly to the cow, who was standing there relaxed, chewing its cud. He was praising the cow for being a magnificent beast, a champion among beasts. And honoring its family of magnificent beasts. And thanking the cow for being willing to give its life to feed the hungry boys. His soothing voice went on for about 10 minutes, and in an instant. he took the spear, and plunged it into the cows heart, and before the cow was even aware of that, it was dead, and it dropped to the ground without even a moo.

So, the other men came over with knives, and I got my razor sharp sheath knife from my pack, and we rolled the cow over and butchered it. I had never butchered a cow before and was amazed after it was cut open, that most of the space inside a cows body is a series of stomachs full of various stages of decomposing grass. It made a huge pile of smelly sour grass as they scooped out the stomachs. It took 5 men and me, about two hours to butcher it into cooking size pieces. I sharpened my sheath knife 3 times before we were done. There is a ton of meat on a cow. It filled three of the big cast iron cookpots, which they lugged over to the ready fires, and put them on the coals to cook. There were cast iron pots of porridge cooking as well, and when the boys got back about dark from the competitions, a feast was waiting for their hungry stomachs.

It was a fun weekend. I pitched my tent, the first pop up tent most of the boys had ever seen, and a line formed of boys that wanted to get inside and sit in it for a couple minutes, and feel it, and talk about it. I went to sleep that night with a smile on my face, and 6 boys who had decided to sleep in my tent with me.

Boy Scouts Matter 

Tradition Matters