"Crazy Like A White Chick"

This week Ashley and I have been on a little bit of a destructive path; we've managed to break the school laminator (the only one) and we punctured a tyre on our truck. Okay, the laminator wasn’t completely our fault, it had been on its last legs for a long time we just pushed it over the edge with our copious numbers of preschool sheets. So we meekly walked to our host and representatives house with the broken laminator and handed it over hoping they would be able to fix it... Unfortunately that didn't happen but the words ‘it’s not your fault’ definitely came out of our representative’s mouth, so we breathed a sigh of relief that we weren't in trouble and made ourselves scarce! 

Just as we had dodged any trouble with the laminator we managed to break something even more expensive, the truck tyre. The day had been a montage of thunder, monsoon rains, lightning and miserable weather; but like the good people we are we packed all the soup kitchen things into the truck and set off in the lashing rain. Forgetting that Swazi’s cower in their houses even when there’s only a spitting of rain, we were heading to soup kitchen in vain. We arrived to locked gates, no children, Aunty Vina sat chilling in her house and lots of slippy wet mud to drive through – brilliant. We gave the food to Aunty Vina for the orphans who live with her and then set off back home again, there was a bit of a hairy moment when we got the truck stuck on the soup kitchen track and Ashley had to jump in to give it some fearless revs! This resulted in wet mud spraying EVERYWHERE, up the sides of the truck, at me (but I jumped out of the way screaming) and it even managed to get inside the truck through the open window onto Ashley, hahaaa. We made it back alright though, only to make it to Shoprite (a 1 minute drive from our hosts’ house) to have a man point at our truck and say ‘puncture, puncture’... I jumped out and found the left back tyre as flat as a pancake, DAMN. We know we shouldn’t drive on a flat, but we clearly hadn’t noticed all the way home and now we were almost back so we carried on. Richard (our representative) wasn’t too impressed with the tyre and told us we have to check all of the tyres before and after we use the truck :( Luckily we managed to pump it back up and plug it, so we won’t be feeling bad that Richard has to pay out E2,000 for a new tyre!

This week there’s been more white people about the place! A group of American Missionaries are over here from Colorado for 2 weeks, their church sponsors the Moriah Centre and they’ve come over to make some developments and build inside the school. They’re building a flat to fit two people, the idea is that hopefully next year there will be room for two more volunteers to live and work permanently at Moriah Centre! They’ve made so much progress already, and they’ve only been building for two days! They cleared out the office, knocked through a wall, constructed a separating wall to corner off the flat area from the church and put it up, made concrete steps to join the  new ‘bedroom area’ to the old office which will be a kitchen/lounge, they cleared out a junk room and moved everything from the office into it, put up shelves, made desks and basically have created a brand new office with all the old resources organised, inventoried and labelled! There are only 7 of them as well! Ashley and I have been helping out in the afternoons, so it’s been really great to be a part of something different – we’ve also managed to get loads of free stuff out of it for Injabulo and soup kitchen because there were lots of resources that had been donated to Moriah and never used, so the missionaries donated them to us... Now our bedrooms are really full and look more like junk rooms with a bed squished into the corner! 

The Missionaries are really lovely people, and we have some great conversations about accents and listening to the way we say words – they definitely can’t talk properly! They say ‘Mom’ instead of Mum, aluminium sounds like ‘aloo-minum’ and oregano comes out as ‘or-egg-ay-no ‘, we’re currently teaching them how to talk properly, and I’ve told them to stop missing out the ‘U’  when they spell colour and favourite. Our educating never ends ;)

This week I’ve also had the pleasure of people suddenly deciding that it is socially acceptable to display their private bodily functions in front of me. I can tell you right now that it is not okay. At soup kitchen Aunty Vina leaned against a wall while talking to me, lifted up her dress, squatted a little bit and took a wee right there. I was totally shocked and was screaming ‘Aunty Vina no! Why are you doing this to me! Stop weeing when I’m talking to you!’ She didn’t see a problem with it and merely said ‘But I needed to pee-pee’, we’ll that makes it fine then. I didn’t notice any knickers round her ankles either, and Ashley has literally just informed me that on Friday Aunty Vina told her that she never wears knickers, and tried to shove Ashley’s hand down her dress so she could have a feel! Crazy woman. 

One of the ladies from Moriah Centres little boys took a poo in front of me as well. I looked up to see him totally naked from the waist down, squatting on the floor with a growing pile of poo beneath his bottom. No such thing as privacy being sacred in Swaziland!

On Saturday we helped out at an inter-schools swimming gala at Mayaluga, a 10 minute drive from Sisekelo. We were helping out on the tuck shop; we got free food and it was actually quite good fun! Took a while for my mental maths to warm up though, counting on your fingers at 18 years old is embarrassing, but was definitely necessary for that first hour. The kids here are infuriating though, they ether don’t talk or they talk so quietly you think they’re miming. Don’t just hand your money to me and expect that I know what you want! They also do this annoying thing where they ask for chips; chips here mean crisps (urgh, Americanisms!), on the tuck shop there were about 6 different types of ‘chips’ on offer, however no one seemed to think it was necessary to ask for the type they wanted, they just ask for ‘chips’ – THAT DOESN’T HELP ME IDIOTS. I think I’m probably over reacting, but even so, it annoyed the hell out of me. The worst ones were the kids who handed you the money, pointed at something behind you and expected you to know what they were pointing at, not one word. Someone needs to teach these kids that pointing is rude, and there wasn’t one thank you uttered that day. Disgraceful, hahaaaa.

It has been a fairly busy week! Successful though, as we have also managed to get all of our kids at Injabulo sponsored for a Christmas present! Now the hard part, shopping for 60 children... that’s going to be a fun day.

Kate xx