Don't you forget about me...

So I’m sat in Johannesburg OR Tambo airport and I can’t actually believe that I’ve left Swaziland for the last time (in the foreseeable future). The last few days have been the most emotional time of my life; my heart has been dragged through happiness and sadness alike, memories have been made that I will cherish for the rest of my life yet the pain of leaving those that I love is still fresh, and I know that it will only heal with time.

Swaziland has made such a huge impact on my life in such a short space of time; 1 year seemed like forever when I was preparing to come out here, but now I realise just how short this time is in the grand scale of things. The culture, the people, the country and my children have all taken a special place in my heart and in my soul... they have changed me for better and I am never going to forget the experiences I have had here.

1 year is so short and fleeting and the children I have worked with are so young that the majority of them are going to grow up and not remember me, even if they don’t remember me I will always remember them and everything they taught me about loving others unconditionally. Despite everything that they go through (things that even adults shouldn’t be expected to handle) they still have the energy to express their love to you in every moment they are in your presence...

I am going to miss the hugs, the kisses on my hand as they leave the classroom, the hugging of my knees as I’m trying to walk and the playing with my hair. I will miss the cheeky smiles across the classroom and the giggles as they press my skin to watch the colour change, I will miss them calling me Aunty Katie and I will miss the pride in their eyes when they are confidently speaking English to me. I will miss the joyful singing and the energetic dancing, I will miss the unnecessarily loud talking and the bright colours, I will miss the dirty faces at soup kitchen and the thank you’s that we really don’t deserve, I will miss speaking in SiSwati and watching people’s reactions when they realise we understood them. I am going to miss the sun shining every day and I will miss Swazi time, I will miss the hard workers, the cheeky children, and the shy ones who you have to invest time in over a few months before earning their trust. I will miss making a sad child smile and I will miss the laughs with the happy ones. I will miss my African life. 

I am scared to go home. You know when you come back off holiday and sit on your bed and it doesn’t feel like you were sunbathing on a beach in Spain only yesterday... it feels like a dream, it feels like you were never away. I am afraid that when I get home my time in Africa will feel like a distant memory, like it isn’t real. This scares me because this has been the most REAL year of my life, I’ve experienced real lives and real people for the first time ever and everything that I have learned I want to keep with me, I don’t want to let it slip out of touch.

This year I have been blessed with a second home, second families, Swazi mothers, new brothers and sisters and too many children of my ‘own’ to count. Leaving Swaziland is difficult as I don’t know when I will be coming back; I don’t know who I will see again. Tears have been shed but it is time to move on, I have to step aside to allow someone else to begin their journey into what I hope will be the first real year of their life. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity; it has been an experience that only comes around once in a lifetime...

You are born and then you die, but in between you can do anything you want. You have to grasp life and shake it by the shoulders, make every mistake possible and learn from them, take risks and mess up... but most of all make sure you have fun. Make sure you never waste a day. Go to sleep with no regrets.

This HAS been the best year of my life, but now it’s in my hands to create more great years.

Kate xx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A

Napoleon the Safari Legend

Plans to take the kids from Injabulo and Moriah to Hlane Royal Nature Reserve on school trips had been underway for quite some time; and finally the time came and we had two weeks filled of children, nature reserves, wild animals and stress.

Injabulo School Trips

To make things even more difficult on ourselves we decided to do something nice for the kids at Injabulo; I do enjoy doing lovely things for them, it’s just that you have a really great idea and then you realise that you have to repeat that really great idea at least 60 times. So, we hit PEP once again (the shop workers in there are basically our family now) to buy 60 blank t-shirts on which we were going to write ‘Injabulo Preschool’ and ‘Hlane 2013’ – yes, that’s right, PRESCHOOL TOUR T-SHIRTS!
After a full weekend of nothing but writing these exact words on t-shirts over and over again I was so sick of it that I would be happy if I never have to see another t-shirt again in my life... however that would be rather impractical.

Hard work paid off!

Teacher t-shirts ;)

To make everything easier on ourselves we stayed over at Nelsiwe’s house on the Tuesday evening to cook the food and get up early for the first trip on Wednesday! We were up at 6am to dish the food into take away boxes and then it was time for another naked basin wash, squatting in a large plastic tub of water in Nelsiwe’s bedroom... at least this water was hot as it had just been boiled in the kettle, which is more than can be said for the showers in hostel on a morning.
So we pack all of the kids into the hired kombi and head off to Hlane! Hlane is a small nature reserve when you compare it to the likes of Kruger (well, compared to the likes of anything as Swaziland itself is tiny!) but we saw Lions, giraffes, elephants, impala, kudu, nyala and even had our road blocked by a herd of white rhino. One Lion we actually saw lying with a dead impala, so we had obviously just missed a kill! Probably for the best really, some 4 year olds might have walked away slightly traumatised after seeing a Lion murder a small impala in front of their eyes.

Crocodile Class

HLANE 2013!

We also took them to Swazi Secrets where they process the oils from the marula nuts to make beauty products, unfortunately they weren’t doing any production while we were there, but the kids seemed to have fun pushing the crushing machines around and wearing marula lip balm.  

The second Injabulo trip was pretty much the same as the first; apart from the fact that Hlane was so busy with about 4 school trips we had to wait hours for our safari. In the mean time we took the kids down to the reception which was teeming with American tourists and we had them all singing and dancing! Yes, we actively paraded our cute preschoolers in front of tourists for entertainment, but it meant that they weren’t getting up to any mischief and the tourists now have lots of pictures and videos of our awesome kids to show people back home.

'Thishela' - teacher in SiSwati.

Ashley’s Birthday!

Friday 19^th sees Ashley joining the land of 19 year olds! To celebrate we had planned to have a joint preschool party for Ashley and Nelsiwe’s daughter Ciara; what we didn’t realise is that Nelsiwe’s plan was to have the party ‘after’ preschool hours, which she failed to tell us. So we muddled through the day with no other teachers and random people in party dresses and presents turning up around 12 o’clock. Failure in communication and Swazi Time... obviously the day was never going to go as planned. 

In the end it was really great fun and absolutely crazy! Nelsiwe had made enough food to feed all of the kids at preschool, all of her children (who stayed off school for the occasion) and all of the guests she invited. There was also a huge birthday cake for Ashley and Ciara, and after the cutting of the cake and making a wish Ciara nearly took off the face of one of the preschoolers as she started jumping up and down with the gigantic knife still clutched in her destructive little hand. This is the girl who can completely wreck my classroom with her bare hands in 10 minutes, rips up worksheets, chews on laminated resources and sucks on the blades of scissors... she should never ever be given anything weapon-like!

Little devil!

We head to soup kitchen with another huge cake that Ashley bought from Matata Spar to hand out, everyone’s eyes (especially Aunty Vinahs!) light up when they see the massive black forest gateaux and everyone gets a slice. 

Mmmm, licking the box clean.

When we arrive back to hostel the girls have a little birthday surprise for Ashley... they drag her outside armed with ketchup bottles, they absolutely COVER her in it before they take a bucket of cold water and dump it over her head. They then proceed to turn on the tap that is used to fill the pool and drench her past drenched! I’m so glad I was in Botswana on my birthday, these girls are merciless!

Ketchup attack

Water attack

Moriah Centre School Trips

With the small Moriah kombi that we drive we were only able to take one class per day... so that’s 4 classes, add that to our Injabulo trips and we would’ve been to Hlane 6 times in 2 weeks! No. We took opposite days for some light relief from driving around all the time.
On both days that Ashley went to Hlane she returned with photos of the watering hole with elephants, giraffes, hippo, rhino and basically everything else all together drinking in a really African scene. When I went there was either nothing at the watering hole, or a few rhinos. Looks like she had the luckier days!
However we did see a Lion and two Lionesses running through the grass towards our kombi, and when they slowed down the Lion basically brushed himself along the back of the kombi... safe to say I was pretty nervous in the driver’s seat!

Moriah Crocodile Class

Other developments at Hlane with Moriah Centre revealed that Aunty Sphiwe (the other teacher of my class) had the hots for Napoleon our safari guide! I could totally tell that they were flirting in SiSwati and then the next trip I went on she told us that we had to get his number for her... PULLED!

Things are crazy as ever here, but I’m going to miss it when it ends.

Kate xx

P.S. At soup kitchen this week Aunty Vinah’s Mum was wandering around with 3 kittens in a bag begging us to buy them for E5 each. That’s £1 for 3 kittens to you. Unfortunately we couldn’t as we have nowhere to keep them, and I was heartbroken leaving them there... but the great thing is we were talking about it at Sisekelo and one of the sports coaches decided he wanted to buy them!
So the next time we were at soup kitchen we bought 2 of the kittens (the 3^rd apparently disappeared or was eaten or something) and brought them back to hostel for him! They’re called Ashley and Kate. Score. 

N'AAAWWWWW <3

Kruger National Park, The Dow Family in Africa and Projectile Vomiting on Whales

Hazyview/Kruger

So being reunited with the family was great! Mum cried, Dad had tears and as expected Ross showed no emotions what-so-ever cause he’s ‘hard’ now... but god is he HUGE.  I’ve been away from them for almost 10 months now, but as soon as we were all together again it didn’t feel like we had been apart for any time at all. Especially when we were all packed into the hire car, driving to Hazyview and arguing over the Sat Nav... it felt just like old times, some things won’t ever change.

Now that the parents are out it’s time to be treated! After weeks on end of travelling around different countries on unreliable public transport lugging a gargantuan backpack, sleeping in bunk beds and surviving on instant noodles it was a lovely change to be staying in an actual Safari Lodge! We had luxuries such as a double bed, a shower that we didn’t share with 30 people, a maid who MADE OUR BED and fancy meals to introduce the family to such as crocodile tail. FYI, if you ever get the change to try crocodile tail I strongly suggest that you do it, it is amazing.

Our first day of our ‘African Holiday’ together was spent driving around the Panorama Route; a beautiful scenic area that boasts some of the most breathtaking views you could imagine. We visited waterfalls, potholes, God’s Window and even had pancakes at a pancake house – fantastic! We even saw elephants by the roadside a mere 5 minutes drive from our Lodge, which was surreal but a brilliant way to get us ready for the main event of the next day... SAFARI IN KRUGER PARK! Wooo!

Route to Blyde River Dam

Kruger National Park is literally the creme-de-la-creme of nature reserves, it is the size (if not bigger) than the United Kingdom and is home to many of the Big 5. Ashley and I have been wanting to go to Kruger ever since we arrived in Africa as it is a MUST SEE of this continent, however on our mere backpacker funds and limited transport we were struggling to make it happen – so thank god the Dow’s did come out! ;)

We hauled ourselves out of our warm beds into the freezing cold morning at the ridiculous time of 5:00am for the sunrise safari; this made the first hour or so slightly bittersweet as my excitement was tainted by my body rejecting the early morning! Amazingly we were only 20 minutes into Kruger before we saw a pack of wild dog and two lions by the side of the road, which really boosted my spirits and got everyone into the spirit of the day and ready to spot some animals.
The safari day was absolutely amazing; we saw millions of impala, kudu and nyala (as expected, they are as common as pigeons in London), bushbuck, waterbuck, mongoose, buffalo, wildebeest, hippo, rhino, warthog, hundreds of herds of elephant and then 4 more lions!(Rubber dingy rapids bro.) Never in my life has 11 hours sat in a vehicle gone past so quickly.

Safari! Driver Bernard :)

LION IN THE WILD, LION IN THE WILD!

The next day saw us on yet another scenic drive to the dam at Blyde River Canyon; I’ve never been to America so I don’t know what it is really like, but driving on the roads up to the mountains made me feel like I was in an American movie on my way to summer camp or something!
The dam was a vast sparkling pool of blue, the place was untouched and one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. It’s so untouched that the wildlife are free to roam around as they please, so it’s safe to say that Ross was more than surprised when he went to investigate the woodland and stumbled across a group of fully grown baboons... he ran back to us pretty sharpish! Don’t blame him really.

Swaziland  

Having the family at the projects was brilliant but surreal at the same time; this place is home for me now but it is brand new for them, and seeing them actually there in the flesh meeting the people we’ve been working with for 10 months was absolutely crazy. I imagine that it was just as strange for them because they’re so used to seeing photos of the places and the children, and then all of a sudden they’re there at the preschool getting mobbed by 30 kids all at once! Mum brought out some gifts for the children at Injabulo; new books and a parachute! Safe to say that they enjoyed the stories we read to them, but they absolutely bat-crap crazy when the parachute came out! It’s a fairly small parachute, and for some reason all they wanted to do was to stand underneath it and scream... which is exactly what they did. So I think they are very pleased with the new addition to activities that they can play, and it’s my mission to actually make them understand how the parachute games work, instead of just gripping onto the material and screaming for 10 minutes.

As we’d just got back off holidays there was no hostel food to cook for soup kitchen, so Mum and Dad bought 10kg of rice, beans, gravy and chackalacka so that we could make the children a lovely fresh meal. They also decided that they wanted to donate loads of fruit to the kids so we ended up taking with us about 100 oranges, 100 apples and 150 bananas! It was one of the best meals we’ve ever served at soup kitchen, and every child walked away with 2 bananas, an apple and an orange which left me feeling ecstatically happy because it’s not often that we are able to take up treats for the kids and I love seeing their faces when we do!
However, the biggest surprise of the whole day was that Mum didn’t cry at the projects; I was slightly disappointed because I’d been looking forward to seeing just how open the flood gates would be! Round of applause to her for keeping it together though.

I think they all really enjoyed spending time with the children, and the only downside of the whole thing was that Ross wore a white wife beater vest and it got dirty... and we ALL heard about it, quite a lot. May that be a lesson to all for the future; when people tell you not to wear white clothes around mischievous African children, DON’T DO IT. Especially if you’re going to complain about it afterwards ;) Told you so.

Lovely candid shot there. Sorry, re-uploading a different one takes too long, waa.
But AUNTY VINAH!

Durban

Hotel view of casino and stadium.

We spent two days in Durban as a pit stop on our travels after leaving Swaziland; our hotel was a stone’s throw away from the Moses Mabhida Stadium and Ross took advantage of this and signed himself up to do the Big Swing! Basically he climbed up to the very top of the stadium and then threw himself off it again. Standing with Mum and Dad watching him do it was torture because Mum was freaking out the whole entire time, and all I could think of was how glad I was that she hadn’t been with me all this year while I had been doing bungees, gorge jumps etc! She’s such a worrier.

Moses Mabhida Stadium Sunset

Durban Beach!

Buzzing after the jump!

St. Lucia

A tiny titbit of information that I have failed to mention in this blog so far is that ever since my family came out my body decided to swap its ‘fight or flight’ response. So far I had been cruising through day to day life absolutely fine (because I had to), but when the family arrived it’s like my body decided to crash and it needed a rest. Unfortunately that meant that I was pretty ill when they were out visiting, so we had to change our travel plans from going to the beautiful Port St John’s and we stayed a little closer to Swaziland... St. Lucia to be exact. This wasn’t a total disaster as St Lucia turned out to be absolutely beautiful!

We drove ourselves through a gorgeous savannah nature reserve (a completely different experience to Kruger, which is dense bush land and you don’t really see much scenery) to Cape Vidal. Cape Vidal is a breathtaking beach that reminded me of the Mozambican coast, and from a viewpoint we were able to see rhino at a watering hole in one direction and then breaching whales in the Indian ocean in the other!
Driving back to the lodge Mum finally did her first stint of driving the hire car; everything was going fine until we came across 2 huge rhinos in the road! All of a sudden Mum was a quaking mess, forgetting how to drive, unable to put the car in gear and screaming all sorts of obscenities at us for just sitting and laughing at her. So we now have two funny stories about Mum on safari; the other being when she expressed her opinions on how there weren’t many people on bikes or motorbikes in Kruger National Park “surely it would be a nice place to have cycle routes”, yeah sure it would Mum, if you wanted to be eaten by a lion or trampled by elephants!

Cutest baby monkey next to our car!

 In St. Lucia we also fulfilled one of Ross’s African Dreams; to play with some wild cats. We went to a cat project that introduces cats back into the wild and we got to play with cheetahs, servals and wild cats. They were the cutest things ever!

Caracal

Cheetah

Drama Queen of a Cheetah, not wanting a photo.

Baby serval! BFF's.

Since we saw all the whales breaching at Cape Vidal we decided it would be worth it to go whale watching, so we hurtle out towards the whales on the boat through the surf with Mum screaming her head off and gripping onto her seat... so loudly that the captain turned around and said “well I hear that we have a screamer on board”. Seeing the whales was absolutely amazing, they came up so close to the boat, went under the boat and were even throwing themselves straight up out of the water. We even had one singing whale, however it was too quiet for me to hear on the top deck, but Mum and Ross apparently heard it. As amazing an experience as it was the whole 2 hours at sea was overshadowed for me by gut wrenching sea sickness, during this period of being ill I’ve obviously broken my sea legs too. Luckily for me this was the first day  I had been feeling a little bit better, yet unluckily for me this was just another day where I ended up chundering everywhere. This time it was from sea sickness rather than sickness, but it doesn’t change the fact that I hurled luminous orange chunks overboard (thanks for that Vitamin C tonic Mum and Dad) and ended up waiting for Mum to find a tissue while I stared at the water moving past my eyes with salt, sick and hair plastered to my face. Probably not one of my most dignified moments.

After the whale watching we were issued with free tickets for a crocodile and hippo boat tour – fantastic. It was on a barge type boat and on an estuary so luckily my stomach stayed settled and I didn’t end up expelling any more bodily fluids overboard.

Our last evening in South Africa was spent much like any other, going to a restaurant to watch Dad and Ross eat massive steaks. I really don’t think they’ll be happy leaving the meat behind when they leave this country, they’ve basically eaten fillet steak everyday for 2 weeks and been as happy as the cat who got the cream. The butchers back home isn’t ever going to be the same again.

Swaziland

I returned to Swaziland to find that I had been thrown out of my room at hostel; not the best welcome home surprise that you could wish for. A high school in Swaziland closed down so now all the other schools are taking on their students; Sisekelo took on too many students in the hostel than they had room for so we (the interns) caught the short straw. We’ve now been squished into one box room, which isn’t so bad if it is what you arrive to, but after 10 months of having some space to actually stand on the floor of your room you start getting a little bit nostalgic for what you lost.

I can’t believe that it is only 6 weeks until I see everyone again! Six weeks left of Africa means six more amazing weeks filled of memories, but it also means that there’s only 6 weeks until I will suffer the worst heartbreak I’ve ever felt... leaving this place will be like tearing off a plaster that takes a chunk of my skin with it, there will be pain and the scar of Swaziland and everyone that I leave behind will be an experience that will remain with me forever. The amazing memories will never leave me, but neither will the ache of turning my back on the people and children I have come to know and love. Being here has changed me as a person, and these are the people who have taught me the lessons; they have taught unknowingly and I have learnt unknowingly. I just hope that these changes will always stay with me and keep on influencing the person that I am and the person that I am still to become.

Kate xx

“I just had s-s-s........” aaargh!

Good things never last forever, and now that our departure date is coming ever closer I am more and more aware of just how much I am going to miss this place when we do have to leave. I’ll just be contently working on project watching as my kids work away and all of a sudden the thought of the last day here hits me... The moment where I say bye to them for the last time, the moment where I’ve hugged the last child and put them down, the moment I turn around and have to walk away, and the moment I lose sight of them as we drive around the corner; my heart is breaking at the thought of these things and stopping impromptu crying in front of children has become quite a regular occurrence in my daily routine.

All our work at Injabulo is going great and the kids are even better, I actually feel like a proper teacher! The best thing is that we’ve had someone else instil their own opinion in us which has boosted our confidence of how brilliantly we are doing on project. It might seem obnoxious of me to say that we’re ‘brilliant’ but when we take a look at the progress we have made this year; the improvements to the school, the increased knowledge of the children and the more advanced English that they are learning there’s really only one word for it! Being at Injabulo makes me glow with pride, it is literally our school and we can do whatever we want with it, which means that it can go two ways; you either constantly make improvements or you let standards slide. I absolutely love being there and you get out twice as much as you put in, and we’ve really been throwing ourselves into the place, and the children are absolutely wonderful because of it. Their level of knowledge is wonderful, not their behaviour though! Haha.
Two workers from the Lutheran foundation came for visits to Injabulo and they congratulated us on the job we were doing there; they said that we were one of the smallest and least supported care points that they had visited but we were also one of the best! They thought that we did a fantastic job with the children and that their English was some of the best they had seen for their age group; we couldn’t have been happier.

I’m afraid this is another short one; I’ve just been so busy educating young minds ;)

Don’t hate on me :)

Kate xx

P.S. The title is from a rather unfortunate event at Injabulo; the Lutheran workers were over and holding a meeting with parents from the community. We had all the children playing outside and were playing music from my laptop for them to dance to... ALWAY BE WARY OF SHUFFLE. Anyway, a rather inappropriate song by The Lonely Island popped on the shuffle list and began to play out full blast in front of children, parents and well, basically everyone. I have never hurled myself at the pause button so fast! I made it just in time.

A Scottish Visitor

My pretty regular visits to Facebook keep me well updated on how warm it is getting over there in England, I can tell that the short shorts have been donned and the shades have been dusted off from a long hibernation. Down here in the Southern Hemisphere things are a little different; Africa is now experiencing winter, and it is not what I expected at ALL. In the early days of this year I scoffed and laughed when the Swazi’s were talking about winter; all their worry about acquiring thick blankets, fires and woollies seemed unnecessary to me as I couldn’t believe for one second that this heated hell-hole could actually cool down. Oh how wrong I was.
Not only does it cool down in Big Bend, the nights are now freezing cold! Okay, maybe not freezing by thermometer standards, but when you’ve been used to ‘low’ temperatures of 20 degrees for 9 months it comes as a shock to the system when temperatures fall to 5 or 7 degrees and you can see your breath as you walk to the bus rank on a morning.

I came to Africa completely unprepared for any cold temperatures as my naivety and ignorance of this diverse and wonderful country led me to believe that it is hot all year round, and that the African people have no idea what it is like to be cold. Talking to the teachers we work with about winter makes me feel guilty for not wanting to get out of my cosy bed on a morning; these women (like many others) sleep snuggled up with their children in tiny breeze block and tin roofed houses to keep warm, they rise at 4:00am to boil water and wash outside in the freezing cold before they and their children prepare for the long walk to school or work at 6:00am... and I used to get cold anxiety when it came to getting out of the shower on a morning before college. Don’t lie; we all get it, ever stood in the shower for a good 5 minutes longer than you need to just because you can’t face opening those doors? Shame on us.

I’ve talked too much and strayed off topic. This post is about Ashley’s best friend Jodie coming to visit!
Jodie visited for about 3 weeks and for that time she came with us every day on project and helped out with the kids; it was like having a 3^rd volunteer! When Jodie arrived it was like Christmas had landed in Ashley’s bedroom at hostel; with a 37kg suitcase she had brought everything but the kitchen sink to Swaziland and probably put some airport workers back out in the process. There was everything in that suitcase; football tops, shoes, toothbrushes, sweets, games, books, clothes, toys and I don’t even know what else! Needless to say Ashley’s class at Injabulo were more than happy when they all tottered off back home wearing brand new football tops and had their mouths full of Tangfastics.

Coincidentally Jodie’s visit and Swaziland’s biggest Arts, Music and Culture festival overlapped; which meant that the 3 of us packed up the minimal amount of clothes, took a tent and a kombi to Manzini and set ourselves of for an International weekend of culture at MTN BUSHFIRE! Bring your fiiiirree!
Bushfire attracts large numbers of people not just from Africa but from every corner of the world; we were camped next to some Spaniards and South Africans, camped opposite some Germans (one of whom we had already met on our Christmas travels!), heard numerous Australian and American accents, met a fair few Brits and even bumped into a topless Scotsman leaving the porta-loo wearing only shorts, a tartan flat cap with the ginger wig inside and the Scottish flag as a cape. As I said, INTERNATIONAL.

Jodie, Ashley and I

The MTN Bushfire festival is held every year at ‘Malandelas - House on Fire’ in Manzini; it boasts the Swaziland Fair Trade Market where independent businesses come from all over Swaziland to sell their wares, and an International Food Market – my favourite place, obviously. You could eat; Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, English, African anything you wanted, all within 30 seconds walking distance of each other. Safe to say I ended up at the Chinese stall in the early hours of one morning ordering spring rolls back to back with a girl from Joburg, judging by the rate that we were scoffing the scalding hot rolls we were equally as starving as one another. Definitely better than a dodgy kebab, although the English stall didn’t even sell those.

We camped for 2 nights at Bushfire and the acts were fantastic; after being in Swaziland for 9 months we finally understand the African House music, which is just as well because that was the main genre! We felt much more confident about cracking out our African dance moves this time around than we did back in October at the Simunye Fair. 

So we’ve now been introduced to a few new artists in our lives and it has broadened our minds to different kinds of music, great music that hasn’t even reached the UK yet! If you’re interested get yourself onto Youtube and check out these guys; Veranda Panda, Toya Delazy, Jeremy Loops and Euphonik.

Sunday morning saw us dropping Jodie off at the airport and making our way back to Big Bend on a kombi. I was still drunk from the night before, smelly, dirty and lugging around a poorly packed up tent; everyone knew where we had been.

MTN Bushfire... been there, done that, got the t-shirt. No really, I actually did buy a t-shirt.

Always bring your fire.

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