Zimbabwe

I am breaking my pattern of posting my blogs on a Sunday to cover the previous week; but breaking up the holidays into blogs of the countries seems to make more logical sense, so here it goes...

First impressions of Zimbabwe were not great; sat at a border post at 3:00am in the morning with our luggage open waiting for 2 hours for a bag check. In the end they barely even looked in anyone’s bags, they just signed our declaration sheets and we had to pack everything back up again. I was cold, tired, annoyed and quite frankly surprised that I walked away without getting piles seeing as there was nowhere to sit apart from on the road.
We eventually got away at 5:00am, only to reach Bulawayo in the afternoon and have to wait through a 3 hour delay for our next bus! Sometimes I just hate travelling.
We reach Victoria Falls and finally get to our backpackers, which turns out to be one of the best places to go for a night out in the town so it’s totally buzzing! Definitely a decent choice.

The falls themselves are absolutely amazing, they are called ‘Mosi-Oa-Tunya’ which is taken from the Lozi language and means “The Smoke That Thunders”... and thunder they truly do!
Victoria Falls is among the Seven Natural Wonders of the world; along with the Aurora Borealis, Grand Canyon, Paricutin Volcano, Harbour of Rio de Janeiro, Mount Everest and the Great Barrier Reef, so if I count the times that I’ve seen the Aurora Borealis from Darlington or Scotland (although they won’t be to their full beauty unless seen from further North), I’ve technically experienced 2 of the 7 Natural Wonders! Now I shall add the remaining 5 to my bucket list.

Oh yeah! Darlington is on an information board in ZIMBABWE.
Now that's a pretty decent achievement for Darlington. 

Walking into the falls there are many shops selling crafts, and the guys owning the shops are trying to get you to hire hideous ponchos to protect you from the spray; feeling brave Ashley, Matt and I (Matt’s a guy from our backpackers) shook our heads and decided we were just going to roll with it. Turns out that the spray was a little more than just ‘spray’, it started out quite light but as we progressed along the viewing platforms and came closer to the falls it became heavier and heavier... So heavy that it felt like you were standing in monsoon rain! We were drenched through, our bags and everything in them were soaking wet, my camera stopped working and my passport suffered slight water damage.

Simply Soaking

The falls give off so much moisture that the land directly close to them is thick rainforest, huge ferns drape themselves over the pathway glistening with droplets of water, flowery vines strangle the mottled trunks of thick trees in whose canopies monkeys and baboons skip chatter and dance. It really is another world. 

The falls can be viewed from both Zambia and Zimbabwe, however I can’t imagine what can be seen from the Zambian side seeing as we were stood at the very point where the falls cascade over the edge of the rock... you can see the water thunder down in all its glory and watch as the spray rises like smoke from the bottom of the gorge to obscure your view and engulf everyone and everything. The very best viewing platform was one called Knife Point; its entrance path was graced with a ‘Danger – Slippery Cliff Edge’ sign, and it wasn’t joking. Moss grew on every drenched stone and we waded our way through puddles with the edge of the cliff merely 1m away. The pinnacle of Knife Point was a high sharp rock (it had a definite likeness to the one in Lion King, so that’s awesome), we blindly fought our way to the top, eyes closed against the spray battering our bodies and hands groping for some sort of security that our feet were failing to provide. Visibility was 0%, it was like we were standing inside a cloud. There was nothing left to do apart from stand tall with our arms spread wide, listen to the waterfall roar past us and savour the spray as it bounced off our bodies.
Just as we turned away to leave Knife Point I took one look back and caught a rare ‘spray free’ moment, the white fog lifted and I could see the whole expanse of waterfall thundering barely 10m away from the sharp pointed rock that we had been standing on. Absolutely amazing.

Another spectacular thing about the falls is that multiple rainbows form in the gorge due to all the spray and the wonderful African sunlight, as you walk along you can see the rainbows stretching from one side of the gorge to the other... how many times are you above a rainbow?!

After a calming morning at the falls we set off for a little adrenalin rush! We had both booked to do a flying fox from the Zimbabwe side of the falls to the Zambian side, but when we got there and I laid eyes on the gorge swing I knew I just had to pay more money and do it instead!
Similar to a bungee you jump off a high platform and fall quite a distance; but unlike a bungee you are not connected by the feet... no, you are connected by a harness at the chest and you freefall with all your limbs flailing into a gorge. This was so much more terrifying than a bungee because there’s no control! I honestly felt like I was on a suicide jump off a building and I screamed like an ignored baby the whole way down. I think that the dogs in Zambia were aware of my presence.
Anyway, so you’re in freefall with your arms and legs waving around like an epileptic in a disco and the water is coming faster and closer to you, just before you reach the water you reach the length of rope and swing in a huge arc over the thundering rapids. My pants were all but soiled but I felt amazing! Scaring the crap out of myself is definitely one of my favourite pastimes.      

Flying Fox, amazing view!

The next day we went for an activity that was arguably safer but just as amazing! We booked ourselves in for an Elephant ride. The Elephant ride is definitely one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunities and we were not going to be disappointed. The elephants were led along in what can only be described an elephant convoy, decked out with their babies and all! After taking photos with the elephants and getting to touch them we were taken to the largest mounting stand you have ever seen and we climbed onto our elephants with our riders. Our rider was called Amos and we were riding elephant Tendai, who had her baby along with her too and was always by our side! We spent an hour touring around the nature reserve; being on an elephant has its advantages because the other animals are used to their presence – we came really close to herds of giraffe and buffalo and could observe them on their own level! 

Tendai and Amos waving bye, cute!

After the elephant ride we had the unknown surprise of meeting Sylvester the Cheetah, he is the only surviving cheetah from a litter that lost its Mother and was attacked by a Lion. He is used to educate people on the risks of animal endangerment and plus we were allowed to stroke him! TOUCHING A CHEETAH NOW HOW COOL IS THAT.

Seeing and being with these animals in the flesh is something that I would never have expected myself to do, coming to Africa touches your life in many many different ways, and it makes me feel sad that most people go through life without ever having the chance to explore further afield and experience these things for themselves. Yes we see these animals on TV and in photos, but nothing can beat the surprising realisation of touching the rock hard leathery skin of an elephant and feeling it’s disgustingly wet truck sucking at your hand after taking a drink of water! These places, animals and people are real and they’re in our reach to visit – I’m so grateful that I’ve been lucky enough to get to experience such things.

One thing that stood out about Victoria Falls to me was the freedom of the animals; I’m not sure whether it is to humour the tourists that visit or because it’s a really ‘African’ place but it isn’t normal (even for Africa) to walk along the street and be faced with baboons sitting on the pavement. Nor is it normal to walk out of the Mama Africa restaurant after eating a delicious dinner of spicy beef and crocodile tail to be faced with a fully grown elephant just chilling on the street outside. This IS Africa, but not everywhere is as crazy as this!
I know what you’re thinking... what does crocodile taste like?! Honestly, it was delicious, it tasted like chicken with the tiniest fishy hint and you chew on it like it is beef. I also have no idea what African seasoning was on it but Ashley and I could not get enough!

So that’s a little bit of Zimbabwe for you!

Kate xx

“I know that we cannot visibly see each other but...”

Last week of work before round 2 of holidays begin!

This week we took all the classes from Moriah Centre on a little school trip to Matata; they learned about the Post Office, bank, clinic, Police Station, bought some treats from the shop and had a walk around the dam to see the ducks. It was the first time they had ever posted a letter in a post box and the first time they’d ever been shut in the dingy outside prison cells at the back of the Police Station (and the last time I hope!)
We had such a great time seeing them outside of the preschool, interacting with people, and learning about just how much/or how little they know about the world around them. When I was driving the oldest class to Matata I was so shocked (and happy) when they pointed to things outside the windows and were referring to them in English, the cutest thing was every time we went over a speed bump they all said “up down, up down!”

Coming back from Injabulo one day this week gave me my first African public transport horror story; a woman had a miscarriage on the kombi. One moment she was fine and the next she stood up clutching her stomach and there was blood all over where she had been sitting, the back of her skirt was saturated red and on her way out of the kombi she trailed blood all along the walls. It was terrible. I felt so sorry for her because she was only young AND was basically chucked off the kombi; she had also desperately tried to clean up the mess herself by wiping it up with a sanitary pad, but they just wanted her off. This story also adds to my questions of just how hygienic some kombis are because once she had left a Gogo (Grandmother) dry wiped the blood up with some tissues and then someone else took her seat. Gross.

Friday this week was a Swazi public holiday; aka the King’s Birthday! He had a huge celebration at Siteki Sports Ground and everyone was welcome to go. We set off early in the morning with high hopes for the day; I even packed my sun cream and sunglasses because I knew that we’d be outside all day and I would fry like a chicken. I needn’t have worried. What I really needed was a set of thermals and a ski jacket. Siteki was FREEZING COLD; there was so much fog that you couldn’t even see the seats at the other side of the stadium, barely 100m away. What made matters worse is that I was wearing flip flops, a knee length skirt, a strappy top and a ¾ length cardigan... definitely underdressed for the weather.
The entertainment did an okay job at distracting me from my chattering teeth and blue feet, there were choirs, traditional dancers and majorettes doing rifle sequences. It was brilliant to see as the only style of traditional dance we had been before was Ummiso, and luckily this time we got to see the type of dancing and clothes worn at the famous Reed Dance (Swaziland’s most famous event, and one that us volunteers never get to see as it happens after our departure and before the new vols come out), I felt so sorry for the poor girls as they were topless in the zero temperatures and after they had finished they all but sprinted across the stadium to throw on as many clothes as they could find!
In typical Swazi style the King arrived one hour late; by this time I had already been sat freezing cold for over 3 hours, you could hardly even see him arrive due to the fog and he had to do a walk around of the stadium so that everyone could get a glimpse. So for about 10 seconds before he disappeared into the fog again the King waved vaguely in the direction of the stands that we were seated on. All the Swazi people were going absolutely wild and screaming for the King, how they had that much energy left after being sat frozen for hours on end I do not know.
We sat through his speech for a respectable amount of time before deciding that it was definitely time to leave for somewhere warmer, so swaddled in traditional Swazi dress kindly lent to be by the Aunties from Sisekelo who we were sitting with I made my way to the bus rank with Ashley, who was luckily dressed more warmly than I was. Lots of people stared at the white girl shivering in the Swazi sheets and the majority of them laughed as well, but I was past caring. I don’t think I’ve ever been this cold in Africa!

Over the weekend we stayed with Kathy and Richard in Manzini so that they could drop us off at the bus rank early on Sunday morning to catch our kombi to Johannesburg! The journey wasn’t too bad apart from me spending most of the time staring at my backpack perched in the trailer in a position that made it incredibly easy for it to be stolen. Once again we found ourselves in the infamous Park Central Station, Johannesburg’s bus rank, I know I’ve said it before and I will say it again, this is the dodgiest and scariest place that I’ve ever been. Every second I feel like I’m about to me mugged, stabbed or dragged off into a world of sex trafficking. We had to spend 5 hours in this place. When 6:00pm rolled around and it was time to get on our Intercape bus I couldn’t be happier, the next 16 hours of bus journey were in guaranteed safety and that’s exactly what I needed after 5 hours in Park Central Station.

Holiday trip ‘Round 2’... commence!

Kate xx

Prison, Police and Superstition

When we’re at Moriah Centre some days I feel more like a taxi driver than a preschool teacher; Monday saw me driving with Cecelia (head cook) to Big Bend Prison to buy seedlings from the Agricultural Project. Big Bend Prison hold criminals with minor offences and those who are serving the last month or two of their sentence are allowed to be unguarded and work on the vegetable plots. Cecelia was buying lines of 6 seedlings for E5 (30p) and planning to grow them in the garden at Moriah Centre. Ironically on the way back from the Prison I was pulled over by Police for speeding (77km/h in a 60km/h zone), and after showing me the video in which I was speeding, taking my licence and making me drive back up the road to look at the speed sign they gave me back the licence and said they’d fine me next time. Lucky.

Injabulo has been going brilliantly well this week; I’m really starting to notice a change in the kids and there are 3 boys in my class who are really beginning to understand English. They translate what I say to the other ones who sit there looking confused! I’m very proud of them all.
Unfortunately for us there has been some tension at Injabulo this week; apparently some guy came up to the teachers Nelsiwe and Bongekile and told them that by the end of this year there would only be one Swazi teacher at Injabulo because the other was going to die. What you don’t know is that most Swazi’s are VERY superstitious, so when Nelsiwe went home and told her husband what had been said he told her that she should quit the job so that she wasn’t the one who was going to die! We ended up having the weirdest ‘meeting’ of all time; which basically involved Ashley and I telling them that this guy was obviously wrong, no one was going to die, the food isn’t poisoned and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT QUIT YOUR JOB. Now this is exactly the kind of crazy that you would never have to deal with in England!

Just a short one this week folks, as it’s getting closer and closer to the end it seems pointless repeating tiny day-to-day happenings... as you’ve already heard the most of it!

Kate xx

Eating the Chicken Eyeballs

Why why oh why.

I’m A Volunteer, Get Me Out Of Here!

The working week this week was pretty standard; nothing spectacular happened so I won’t rattle on about it. The most important part of this week was the WEEKEND!

This weekend we had planned to go and stay at soup kitchen with Aunty Vinah and the orphans; we figured that we’d head up on the Friday, stay the Friday and Saturday night and then leave on Sunday after Swazi church. What we weren’t expecting is that Aunty Vinah invited almost the entire soup kitchen crowd to come and stay over too! We were only expecting it to be the kids that lived with her, but it actually turned into a mass soup kitchen sleepover. 

We’d been selling bags of crisps to the girls in hostel for a while, so we took the profit we had made and bought some crisps, sweets and nice drinks for the children to have over the weekend. We also took loads of spaghetti that hostel didn’t use and fed the kids with it for dinner and lunch!
The Friday night we took a walk with the children and visited 3 of their homesteads; at the first homestead we met one of the girls Grandmothers (Gogo), she has to be the most inspiring woman I have ever met. After 10 minutes talking to her all I wanted to do was cry. 

We arrived at the homestead and I went over to her and greeted her in SiSwati, assuming that it would be more polite and she might not speak English. Then Aunty Vinah walks over and shouts “No no SiSwati! Good English this one!”, and then the Gogo started laughing and began speaking to us in perfect English. It turns out that she was an English teacher and then ran a preschool for the local children out of her homestead, now she says she’s too old to teach and there needs to be someone else to carry on a preschool in Mpolongeni. She told us how she and everyone else in the community are very grateful to us because we feed the children well and they’ve started getting bigger, she told us how the children love coming along to soup kitchen on Tuesday’s and Friday’s and it really helps them all as they sometimes can’t afford to feed all the children who stay with them. Three of the girls from soup kitchen lived with this Gogo, but only one of them was related to her – she’d taken the other ones in off her own back. She doesn’t work and she keeps a few chickens, that’s all. 

She’s an amazing woman and I felt so lucky to have met her; but what it made me realise is that there are probably lots of women out there in every community exactly like her... old, not working  but trying their best to support those around them.
The people out here might have very little money and material belongings but they have characters and values that far exceed those we have in the Western world – there’s a lot we can learn from people exactly like this Gogo about selflessness, caring, gratefulness and loving those around you. In the poorest corners of the world you will find the greatest people.

Walking to the homesteads.

In the evening we all assembled in Aunty Vinah’s living room to watch a movie, not everyone could fit inside so the curtains were pulled back and benches set up outside the window so that people could sit outside at watch through the glass! Before this day if you had asked me the name of the worst film I had ever seen I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer, but if you asked me now I wouldn’t hesitate in saying ‘Kung Pow – Fists of Fury’.  It was a badly dubbed Asian karate film, the main character had a cartoon face that lived on the end of his tongue, the main female character’s voice was dubbed by a man squealing very high pitched, there was a field with a karate cow living in it and a really awkward scene where the main male character defeated the cow by frantically milking its udders until it was left shrivelled up and lying deflated in the field. I know what you’re thinking... now you have to see it for yourself.

Ashley and I then camped down on the floor of the building that the orphans sleep in with the orphans and the rest of soup kitchen. It was like when you have sleepovers with your friends when you’re younger, everyone is too excited and they keep talking until the early hours of the morning! We had a good night’s sleep and the only bad thing about it was that I woke up with some sort of cockroach/beetle thing crawling on my leg, and then I found one on my arm too. But I can get over that! 

Sunset at Aunty Vinah's place.

Sleeping room!

Saturday we got up at 6:45am to help give the kids breakfast; we then ‘bathed’ in Aunty Vinah’s bathroom (that doesn’t work), so we had a large tub each filled with water to squat and scrub in. Then we went to the soup kitchen field/maize field/cow pasture and played some soccer with the kids, I hung out with Tanele and was just enjoying hear her chatter away to me in SiSwati – I also learned that she calls me by the term umlungu (white person) and not Kate, but it’s cute!

Tanele <3

We then went with three of the boys to buy four chickens to cook for everyone to eat, this is our second chicken catching, carrying and killing experience and I’m getting pretty used to tucking squirming poultry under my armpit.

We then set up Ashley’s portable DVD player with Madagascar 2 Escape to Africa (culture appropriate!) and created a mini cinema to keep everyone entertained while we helped with the vegetables and the cooking.  Most Swazi’s have a tin hut for their kitchen and cook in large cauldrons over fires, therefore the room you cook in is enclosed, boiling hot and filled with smoke – it’s like that horrible minute a campfire turns on you and blows smoke into your eyes, but the whole room is like this... You can barely see or breathe and have to walk outside every 30 seconds because your eyes are streaming and itchy.

Cinema!

Preparing the chickens.

The rest of the day was a blur of eating, sitting and talking, playing with the kids and more eating... I don’t know what it is but they all had 5 HUGE meals, all 34 of them! I don’t think that happens normally, but we were buying so we were quite happy to do it. At least they ate really well for one day. 

Playing

Ashley and I also furthered our experimentation of eating bits of chickens; this time we pulled an I’m A Celebrity stunt and ate an eyeball each! It was squishy, rubbery and hard in the middle – I chewed once, gagged and swallowed it whole, couldn’t deal with anymore chewing! I couldn’t even tell you what it tasted like; it was just the horrible texture that has fixed itself in my mind. It seemed to not faze Ashley though; she just chewed away like it was a lovely piece of peri-peri chicken breast... I have to say, I’ve come a long way since arriving in Africa, when I left England I would only eat chicken breast, sausages, burgers, mince etc and wouldn’t touch meat with bones in. WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!

Gag reflex.

On the evening we open up a packet of marshmallows and show the children how to put them on sticks and roast them on the fire, at first they were really confused at why they would want to ‘burn’ their marshmallow, but we showed them how to do it, and once they tasted it they realised why it’s better to put them in the fire! They then started running around with the melted marshmallows on sticks shouting “ice-cream ice-cream!” because the runny marshmallow looked like melted ice-cream... apparently.

The next morning I got up at 6am to help Aunty Vinah make fat cakes in the kitchen; fat cakes are like doughnut balls and everyone in Swaziland sells them. Aunty Vinah makes them every day to sell at her ‘market’ along with small bags of crisps, ice blocks and small bags of fruit and vegetables. You make balls with the mixture and drop them into hot oil, Aunty Vinah wouldn’t let me turn them over at first because she said “If you burn your feet your parents will kill me! Going around with a bandage on your foot, no your parents will beat me!”, so when she went out of the kitchen I kept my feet a safe distance away from the hot oil, turned the fat cakes and received a round of applause from Aunty Vinah when she returned “aaah clever girl clever girl! You are Swazi now.” She’s too funny.

'Market'

For breakfast Ashley and I were treated to the delicacy of the chickens insides and bread; so I tucked into a chicken intestine sandwich and washed it down with A LOT of tea. The novelty wears off after a while; all I wanted was something normal. :(
After breakfast we brought out some paper and pens and did some drawing with them all, we asked them to draw what they had enjoyed the most about the weekend – most of the pictures were of food, a football and the DVD player, but at least we know they really enjoyed themselves!

Aunty Vinah and her husband Simelane do church in the room the children sleep in on a Sunday, Ashley and I joined in and we had a really lovely hour and a half of singing, listening to Mr Simelane talk and listening to all the children say thank you to us for coming and spending time with them. It’s definitely been one of the best weekends since being in Swaziland, and the whole time we had church I just felt like crying, the kids and Aunty Vinah were so grateful for us coming to stay with them, and we’d had a brilliant time spending more time getting to know them. The 2 hours of soup kitchen never really give us time to bond properly with the kids because it’s just a wild mess of bodies trying to get to their food.

We were very sad to leave soup kitchen on Sunday and go back to hostel, so I don’t know what it’s going to be like when we leave for good in August! I’ll be a wreck. Aunty Vinah was also sad to see us leave, she really loved having us over and kept saying the whole weekend “you are the only white people to come here”, I think she’d happily have us live there forever. 

I feel that these children are like my brothers and sisters, through everything that life has thrown at them they manage to be lovely lovely kids, and it was an honour to have them accept us into their little soup kitchen family and have us stay with them. 

For my whole life I will never forget this weekend.

Kate xx