My Swaziland Post

When I began to write a blog, I had very low expectations. In fact, I had no expectations. When I hit double-digit reads in a day, I was thrilled.

Then things got crazy. By that, I mean I had a few people say some nice things to me and some even read more than one post. Having no expectations, you would think this would be enough for me. I could be satisfied and relax.

Unfortunately, I am difficult to impress.

I was looking at my blog’s stats this evening when I stumbled upon the page that tells me what country most of my reads were coming from. Normally this is of no consequence to me. I do not care what country is reading my blog. Most of the time it is the United States or our neighbors to the north. As expected, they were at the top of my list.

Instead of exiting like I normally would, though, I scrolled down. This is always a bad move. If you are ever on a web page with statistics and you scroll down, you will most likely see something that is less than pleasant. You never scroll to the bottom of the stats and find out that you are ranked the number one greatest human being in history. You’re more likely to find you were ranked the 6,100,000,000^th most attractive person on the planet.

There at the bottom was a surprise.

At some point in the past 10 months, someone visited my blog from Swaziland. This is great except for one thing: only one person visited. Once. They came and looked at my blog and never came back again.

I looked at this in horror. I pictured a Swazilandian (Note to self: make sure this is a word) running to his other Swazilandian friends.

“Hey, I just read this terrible blog online from the United States. It was the worst!”

“Oh really,” his friends would say. “Why was it so bad?”

“He only wrote about himself and his country. He is a total ethnocentric idiot! He makes me hate him and the United States! What a bum!”

That meant only one thing: instead of writing like I normally do, I had to write to a specific audience. An audience I know nothing about. I mean, there are 1,185,000 people in Swaziland. If I have my way, I will become the Perez Hilton of Swaziland. I want the number one Swazi website.

I will work towards that goal starting now:

With the 2013 House Assembly elections coming up, there is a great deal of chatter. Things have not been this heated since the Anglo-Boer War forced the United Kingdom to let Swaziland become its own protectorate. People are going crazy like hip hop act Vamoose is playing at the Umhlanga festival and the women are all out of reeds to cut! If it was up to me, I would vote for former Miss Swaziland Nkosingiphile Dlamini. I mean, a beauty queen who is also a high jumper? Why would anyone doubt that she would be able to help Swaziland out of its financial burdens with South Africa?

That is a good start. I’ll have to do a bit more research before I become the biggest Swazi celebrity there is. Who knows? Maybe this will get me up to two reads.

At the very least, that guy from Swaziland will have to take that bit about being ethnocentric out when he tells everyone how terrible I am. That’s at least a small win.

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