One Month Back in Swaziland!

My blogging style is normally one blog per week; but since getting back we have been caught in a whirlwind of stress, long hours, inconvenient journeys, ridiculous heat and so so so so so many children. There are children literally coming out of my ears.
I do sincerely apologise to anyone who has been biting their nails down to the quick in angst, just wondering where all my interesting posts are. (I doubt there are many of you). As you will soon see I have barely had enough time to shower and eat this past month, and the near future doesn’t look like it will be bringing us any relief!  

Our first week back was very uneventful; it basically included sleeping, washing all our clothes (and my towel, it smelt DISGUSTING), trying to keep cool (and failing) and taking lots of showers to try and rid ourselves of the constant sweat. Well, the constant sweat was me; Ashley seems immune to the heat whereas I am the equivalent of a snowman lost in the desert.
We spent one creepy night completely alone in the darkness of hostel due to an insane storm causing a power cut; we didn’t get to eat anything as we couldn’t cook, and Ashley walked around with a head torch on. She loved it.
The new student’s orientation was that weekend, which we had been told we had to be back for. Turns out we didn’t have to do anything at all, and we had lost a week’s travelling. However we did probably save an awful lot of money being stuck back in hostel and not gallivanting around South Africa for another 7 days. The prefects decided to wake the ‘newbie’s’ up at 2:00am with vuvuzelas which sent me straight back to the early morning horrors of Leadership Camp, at least this time I could stay snuggled up in bed! Suckers.

Contact from the UK! Specifically Scotland.
On arriving back to Swaziland it was like the Highlands had come for a visit; one of last year’s volunteers Hannah Craig sent us out a parcel for Christmas, so we had cards to hand out to everyone and also some shortbread – which I was particularly happy about! Ashley’s Aunty also sent out 3 tins of haggis for everyone to try, so Ashley cooked up a nice little meal and we tucked into the surprisingly delicious substance that is haggis.
Big thank you to the Scots out there! Your culture and culinary delicacies were much appreciated.

Injabulo Preschool
We’ve also discovered the brilliant coming home surprise in the form of food donations at Injabulo! The first 4 months that we were here we hadn’t been receiving food donations of any sort; and normally the preschool received a donation every month so we could feed the children at lunch time.
So for 4 months we had been angrily ringing around all of the local people with the power, trying to source where our food was... Then out of the blue we arrive at preschool to find our store room completely empty of our resources (panic, we thought we had been robbed), and full of food. We hadn’t been robbed by the way, only badly reorganised.
So now we can actually feed our children! Thank you WFP (World Food Programme).
FYI; Ashley and I have tried some of the food, its brown mush that tastes like burning cigarettes... I think the caregivers might need a new pot.

Nelsiwe buzzing for the food!

The food that tasted like smoke, yum.

Last year we thought we had a lot on our plate with 60 children... but after our Registration Day turned into “Registration Week - pop by whenever you like and we’ll probably let your kid in because you’re in a bad situation and we can’t turn you away/your kid is really cute” fiasco; we have now managed to land ourselves with 76 registered children. Flip-my-life. 

Luckily one of the parents who was registering a child wants to help out with teaching at Injabulo; the idea is she will volunteer for a while and not have to pay school fees, then she can receive a share of the money like Nelsiwe does. This makes our lives the tiniest bit easier because we have another body to help out... It also makes Nelsiwe’s life a whole lot easier on the days that she’s alone with all those crazy children!

This isn't even one full class...

Nelsiwe also said to Ashley and I that “when you are not here it’s like I am walking alone through a desert with no shelter, but when you are here it’s like there is a big biggg shelter over me and I know that everything is alright” – what a cutie.

Everything started out pretty peachy at Injabulo this year, yes there were a lot of children but they were kind of behaving themselves... Until this week.
Ashley and I arrived early to Injabulo to find the store room COMPLETELY ransacked, it looked like we had been robbed by a heard of blind elephants. We had a bit of a rant and a rave, complained about the state of the place and decided that we would have a meeting with Nelsiwe about the mess. Then we knuckled down and tidied it up, for an hour. Later on that morning when we were sorting out payment with Nelsiwe and Bongkile (the parent volunteer) we left to classroom to find the kids had gone into the store room; they pulled EVERYTHING out from where we had tidied it away to, strewn books all over the bloody village and decided that puzzles work better when the pieces are buried in dirt. It was worse than before.
As you can probably tell, we were not happy. At all. Ashley had a bit of a screaming fit and shouted at all the kids to go home, we screamed on about never going into the store room, respecting toys and not throwing books. I walked into the trashed store room, stood alone and took a breather; I was so furious I was about to punch a wall, and with there being so many children about the place one of them was bound to run in the way and would end up with a black eye or something... Plus Ingrid (our Desk Officer and Director of Project Trust!) is coming out to visit us in 4 days, so it would be rather bad on me if I looked like a child abuser, might just get repatriated for that. 

Moriah Centre

Moriah Centre has also increased in numbers this year! It’s about time too; the preschool has 7 teachers and there are only 4 classes, last year the largest class had 10 pupils in – when you compare those statistics to Injabulo you can really understand just how much we have to battle to complete the easiest things. So now there are 4 classes with 15 students in each, still easy as pie to manage and now more children can come to preschool!

Since coming back Ashley and I are the designated kombi drivers for Moriah Centre; we drive the kombi that has been donated by the American Missionaries, so that should mean we have lovely, calm stress-free mornings because we drive (rather than walk to) Moriah, right? Wrong.
It is currently summer in Swaziland, and also the rainy season. For the past month it has been chucking it down almost every night, and there’s been a fair few thunderstorms with tornado like winds, supreme lightning and annoying power shortages. Therefore all 3 dams in the country are flooded, and all the rivers are high, which means that no one can cross the bridge from the village ‘Game 5’ to our area of Big Bend. Every morning we have been leaving before 7am to walk 20 minutes to Ubombo Primary School (UPS) to collect the kombi, then we drive to Game 5 pack 5 teachers and about 30 kids into the kombi and drive them to preschool with our fingers crossed, hoping that the police doing traffic checks don’t look too closely into our windows.
We then drive them all back after preschool, and walk back from UPS in the blazing heat. Even the days we’re at Injabulo we’ve been doing the Game 5 run, so in between running Moriah people around we have been getting on 2 public kombis to Injabulo in the middle of nowhere, teaching, waiting (sometimes for 2 hours) for kombis back, taking everyone home, walking back from UPS and then cooking for soup kitchen. Hectic. ‘Working 9 ‘till 5’, I wish... try 7 ‘till 6.  And that’s not including paperwork.

Swaziland, please stop raining and let everyone walk across the bridge. Thank you.

However, we have had some pretty funny times since returning;

• We missed the very first day that all the kids came back because we were at Injabulo, but Mary (one of the teachers) told us that “yesterday was like a funeral, all the kids were crying like someone had died!”
• Cecelia one of the cooks decided that she was going to bash the curtains in the church hall while we were doing singing and dancing with the children... This unleashed a plague of horrible black insects that look like evil grasshoppers, they jump in all directions like tiny reflex balls on steroids and for some reason have appeared in our lives in their thousands since coming back. Summer must be their breeding season. :( The kids were running around and screaming while I was squashing anything that came near me; meanwhile Cecelia and Gugu were calmly using brooms to herd up the insects into enormous black writhing masses in the corners of the room before disposing of them with an industrial hoover. I am not exaggerating, there were literally thousands of them.
• Ashley finds a dead snake.
• Nonhlanhla and Khanyisile (two more teachers) beat down a tiny bird that was flying around the church hall with some flags... They were charging around like nutcases, wielding these flags for about 10 minutes, they nearly smashed through the windows and brought down the ceiling fans! They didn’t kill it as Ashley and I originally thought; only traumatised it enough so that it lay still while they were walking around with it pretending to eat it, and telling everyone not to free it because they were saving it for lunch. “No, not dead, just tired. It’s meat, for the fire, for BRAII! It’s nice.”“Where is it, I want my lunch. I want to eat it, want my lunch.” Ashley and I freed it, that’s where it went. To be honest, I think she was kidding about having it for a braii that day. But I don’t doubt that she probably has killed and eaten birds on other days.

Florence getting in on the action!

Nonhlanhla with her lunch.

Freeing the bird from its fate.

My re-enactment of how they were chasing the bird around - this is much tamer actually! But similar things went on for a good 5 minutes. 

 Soup Kitchen

You will all remember the money we raised before Christmas to buy shoes for the kids at soup kitchen, and to buy presents for our preschoolers... Anyway, we had a fair bit of that money left over, so we decided to buy every child at soup kitchen a lunchbox and water bottle – this way they all have a container to bring with them for the food, we don’t have to serve them 2nds into their bare hands and they can take clean water home with them! A pretty sound investment if you ask me.

New boxes!

 We also hand out loads of rejected clothes from girl’s hostel, they all leave stuff behind when they go home for the Christmas holidays and we ended up getting most of it! Amongst this large collection of clothes was a swimming costume, maybe a woman’s size 12... and Aunty Vina claimed it for herself. Now you have seen pictures of Aunty Vina and she is not a small lady. But she was incessant “For meee! For Durbaan!” So she’s going to be hitting the Durban beaches in a pretty tight black one-piece, you work it Vina!

For DURBAAAAAAN, hahahahahahaaa :D

We’ve seen Aunty Vina have quite a few freak outs in the last month; the first was over her maize crops.  A sponsor gave her maize seeds to plant in a field so she can grow it to feed the orphans who live with her; apparently a patch in the middle of the field has been stolen and she went mental at all the kids one time we were there! She thinks that either they stole the maize, or their families, or someone that they know... Thing is it could’ve been anyone, but they all got an earful, bless.
The second freak out was directed at one girl from soup kitchen; she accused Aunty Vina of keeping soup kitchen food to herself. One Friday we didn’t have transport so we couldn’t go to soup kitchen, therefore the kids were expecting twice as much food the next time, but there wasn’t because we had forgotten to defrost it. One of the older girls turned around to Aunty Vina and (I assume) accused her in front of everyone of keeping the food – which she didn’t do because we just hadn’t brought it. Safe to say Aunty Vina wasn’t best pleased at the accusations and she verbally tore a strip off this girl. I can’t say I’m not surprised, she comes under a lot of scrutiny from certain jealous people in the community, and if gossip starts (whether it be false or true) things could get difficult for her.

We have also been introduced to the Swazi drink ‘Buganu’ by Aunty Vina, which is a beer made from the marula fruit. Marula fruit trees are very common in Swaziland, and the marula season begins each year in mid Feburary – May. Everyone is Swaziland has a massive celebration of the marula fruit, and every year the Kings holds an annual Marula Festival where different families present the Royal family with some of their home brewed Buganu. Then everyone gets drunk as hell.
It’s a cloudy white substance and basically tastes like very strong beer, it’s about 8.7% and I can’t say I’m a massive fan. But it’s traditional and I can say I’ve tried it, so that’s good enough! Everyone who drinks it gets absolutely steaming, and apparently it brings out an uncontrollable urge to eat meat, and livestock thefts increase significantly during marula season... Interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tlF3kGbT4 - hit this link and you won't regret it!

Hostel

Aunty Rose has been an absolute STAR since we got back from South Africa, her banter has excelled over the Christmas holidays and she genuinely makes me wet myself at least 3 spectacular times in a week. You have no idea about this woman, really, check out my ‘Aunty Rose’ post as there are a few more gems on there!

THE STORY OF THE BLACK MAMBA – one day at hostel Ashley and I headed down to the staff room at school, only to find all of the teachers gathered outside the computer room. We had no idea what all the excitement was about so we decided to investigate. Turns out that the IT teacher had been sat working and not realised that there had been a black mamba snake coiled up on the computer table next to him! Mambas are deadly venomous and a black mamba bite would leave you dead within 2 minutes; don’t even try getting to a hospital, you might as well just lay down and think about all the lovely things that have happened in your life.
Anyway, we went inside the computer room to have a look at the snake because since being in Africa we haven’t come across one, even though they are all over! After feeling a bit tense in the room we left to allow the security guards to dispose of the mamba. They came in wielding a double barrelled shotgun and a large plank of wood. There was some discussion over whether they should turn off the electricity and shoot it (not a great plan as they would have destroyed some computers), or wait until it slithered into an open space and shoot it. Neither of these plans happened. In the end they took the plank of wood and beat it to death. It was quite exciting.

Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Kathy and Richard’s New House

After a hectic week on project we decided to get away for the weekend; we caught a public kombi to Manzini and were treated to a restaurant dinner by Kathy and Richard at a rather fancy Portuguese place. We were then taken to their new house, which is MASSIVE and overlooks the hills and countryside of Manzini. There are 3 large bedrooms for the two of them, a swimming pool, two verandas and you could have a game of five aside football in their lounge. 

The next day we moved onto our backpackers ‘Sondzelas’ which is inside Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, we walked down an unmarked dirt track for 5km in the blazing midday heat with no idea where we were going. Finally we arrived and headed down to main camp that night for a spot of Swazi Dancing! 

This track was ENDLESS. We walked right into the horizon of this photo I swear, and even further. 

Sunday morning we went for a walk in the sanctuary, we headed over to the lake and walked the ‘Hippo Trail’, unfortunately we didn’t see any hippos but we did see our first zebras! We also had our lunch kindly paid for by a group of people who were HASH-ing in the sanctuary. Allow me to explain... Rich people from Swaziland and Mozambique had met each other at the sanctuary to do what they enjoy the most, drinking and running. We were talking to 3 people from the HASH group for a few hours in the restaurant and they offered to pay for our food and drinks, score! We also caught a lift back to Manzini with one of them in return for helping out with a weekly food shop... great deal.

Oh hi Zebra.

Finished walking the Hippo Trail

Braving the animals, trooper.

It has been a stressful few weeks back, but now we’re starting to get back into the swing of things. Ingrid is coming out for a visit this coming week, so we’ll have some pressure on us! Nah, just kidding, we’ll cruise it, Swazi vols are the best vols after all. ;)

Kate xx