Swaziland

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Swaziland is a landlocked African country located between South Africa and Mozambique. It has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world and is the last absolute monarchy in Africa. The King recently purchased an airport that isn't even close to the capital. Swaziland has no official religion.

People from Swaziland are known as 'Swazis.'[1]

[edit] AIDS culture

Part of the reason the rate of HIV infection is so high in Swaziland has to do with its cultural attitudes toward sex. Safe sex is discouraged, women are encouraged to have at least 5 babies apiece, and men are encouraged to impregnate as many women as possible[2]. This leads to a good deal of bare-backing, which is just what a sexually-transmittable virus like HIV needs to flourish.

[edit] Language

The official language of Swaziland is Swati, also known as Siswati. There are few published books dedicated to learning Swati. About the only place an English speaker can hope to learn the language online is from the Peace Corps.

Swati is a tonal language, like Mandarin Chinese, which means the rise or fall in pitch as you pronounce a syllable is important. If you change the pitch, you change the word you're speaking into a different word altogether. So be careful not to let your voice swoop upward unnecessarily at the end of a question.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Robots from Swaziland would probably be called Swazibots.
  2. "Swaziland: A culture that encourages HIV/AIDS," Integrated Regional Information Networks, 15 April 2009
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