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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Because of Eswatini, I won a free 7-Up.
On Thursday, my classes done, I passed by a table at the Concordia mezzanine that still had a student group set up there. Three or four people. A laptop facing outwards, a donut box, mini soft drink cans, pencils.
I asked what they were about, and the wavy-haired woman on the left asked, "Have you heard of Eswatini? Do you know where it is?"
Vague memories coalesced. "It's...oh, it's near South Africa? But it used to be called something else. Swaziland?"
Another girl laughed and said I'd got two of the questions already. The first one started a quiz on her laptop.
The fun part was the flag guessing. Five flags. I eliminated two right away (Japan and South Africa). The next looked like it was from a Muslim-majority country. The two remaining were quite different: one had a bold shield pattern with a primary-colour background and borders, the other three vertical stripes, green-white-green. I guessed the shield. Correctly, it turned out!
(Looking at https://www.countries-ofthe-world.com/flags-of-the-world.html, the "Muslim country" one appears to be Iran - shame on me for not remembering - and the green-stripe one Nigeria.)
The not fun part were the statistics that 27% of the people there are HIV positive and the life expectancy rate is 29. Now, I don't know where they got these figures, and if infant mortality is high, the median life expectancy would be higher than the average. So if you survived childhood, you could expect to live much longer than 29. Still.
They weren't raising money for anything at the moment, just getting publicity for the club, which would help with medical and educational programs there, from what I gathered.
Now, I don't know how everyone there was connected to Eswatini. It's not a huge place, so perhaps someone has a family connection to it. Still, you can hear about places other ways (such as my brother's talking globe, back when Eswatini was still Swaziland). And now I'm stereotyping by colour, thinking it would have been the black and not the white person - she looked white to me, anyway.
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