THE Haircut!

Nandipa preparing her tools!

Finally, after two months of vacation, animal intrusions, workshops and the med hut school has started again! I was so excited to get back and see all of my teacher friends and student friends this week! I was in such a good mood, in fact, I decided to treat myself to a hair cut. My little sisi, Nandipa, had mentioned swimming in the pipe (there is a little pipe that comes out of the side of a hill that trickles water into a stream... stream is a generous term... into a muddy area through which water moves slowly... theoretically - anyway, that is where we get our water) earlier and I asked her if she wanted to go splash around. I asked if she ever took baths there and she said yes, so I asked her if she wanted to wash my hair at the pipe. She seemed pretty excited and the words, “Do you want to cut my hair?!” just jumped out of my mouth. She looked at me with a confused smile while her mom, Hlangiwe, explained what I meant. She was all in. 

We brought shampoo and a comb to the tiny pipe. You see, washing hair in a bucket is neither fun nor is it easy nor effective. I have learned to live with a perma-film in my hair as it is impossible (without using two days of water) to rinse the hair clean after shampooing. So the prospect of “running” water is quite exciting. Nandipa had a blast sudsing up my hair and combing it for ages in the stream. It was all I could do to convince her that cutting it would be even more fun. 

The girls at work

Londiwe cutting strands

After chasing Nandipa home with a lizard I’d caught (Swazis HATE lizards, snakes, and frogs), I grabbed my scissors and camera. I handed her the shears and her mother the camera. Londiwe, a high school student who came back to live on the homestead now that school is in session, came to see what was up, and I told her to grab a pair of scissors and jump in! I asked the girls not to cut more than about an inch or two [please note that A) They don’t use the ‘inch’ system here  B) My siSwati sucks and C) Nandipa speaks less English than I do siSwati, and Londiwe and I use mostly non-verbal communication]. I don’t know what the heck I was expecting, but after about ten minutes I got a sudden jolt of reality. I am the first white person these girls have ever know. Besides two hair combing sessions in the last few months, this is the first time they have ever touched “white-people-hair”. Everyone in this entire country has their head shaved (except sometimes women who have < 1 inch long hair with extensions weaved in). I think it was when, after a few minutes of conversation, Hlangiwe said in English, “No, that’s her natural hair,” and Londiwe stopped with a blank look that I finally realized what I was doing. The girls were pulling chunks of hair out to the sides and cutting hunk-by-hunk each taking a side of my head. I couldn’t help but envision my brother-in-law, Andrew, cutting his dogs hair with the exact same method. And while Jodo the terrier looks great with layered patches of hair (I don’t mean that in a bad way, she really does look cute when you cut her hair, Andrew), I didn’t think that would look particularly awesome on me. “Ok, that’s good! I think we are all done cutting now!” I blurted.  Londiwe must have seen the fear emerge on my face, as she dropped her scissors and took off. Nandipa wasn’t so quick and I had no idea what to say to make my message clear. Chunk - chunk - chunk hit the ground at my feet. I pulled my head away, “Alright no more cutting! Thank you!” I confiscated the scissors. For fifteen painful minutes, I sat while she combed and styled my hair, not knowing what I was going to look like walking into school the next day. When I finally got inside to see the mirror, I saw what Nandipa meant when she said, “No, it’s tall. It’s too tall,” when I ended the cutting session. I took a few un-calculated whacks to taper my mullet, and that night I knelt by my bed to say a prayer of thanks to God for blessing me with very curly, self-masking hair.