“Do you want to learn Chinese?” “No I don’t want to karate!”

THE AMERICANS ARE BACK.

Big Bend has been hit with yet another wave of incorrectly pronounced words, glorious gifts and goodwill; all courtesy of Loveland Colorado. Two of the men who came out last year are back and they have a new couple in tow; it was lovely seeing them again however it was shocking how it seemed like we’d only just said goodbye! I blinked at 4 months shot straight out the window.
We dragged them along to soup kitchen with us (well, we didn’t drag... they came willingly and brought peanut butter sandwiches) to meet the kids and Aunty Vinah. They helped serve the food, danced with the kids and generally got stuck in! Soup kitchen love having visitors and Aunty Vinah was out to milk them for donations, and she wasn’t bothered about coming across subtle!
Soup kitchen seems to be growing all the time, we see new kids every week and this week there have been some new animal additions; Aunty Vinah’s dogs haven’t been ‘for the snip’ so they keep having litters all over the place. So this week I was introduced to 8 tiny puppies still blind and rolling in the mud, they are cute as hell and I want one. Aunty Vinah is happy to give them away free as well because she struggles to feed them, now I just have to work out where I can hide one in hostel...

WANT IT

Again the missionaries came along with tons of toys, clothes and presents for the children at Moriah, and once again there were plenty left over once everything had been handed out. So in steps Ashley and I; we’ve become pretty good at positioning ourselves in the way of free stuff over the last 6 months, you just need to surround yourself with generous people! 
Just kidding; the missionaries are always HUGELY kind to us and shower us with things to hand out at our other projects, and for that I am eternally grateful. This time around we must have been given about 50 odd dresses made by a charity called ‘Dress A Girl’, so we took them all to soup kitchen so that all of the girls there could have a pretty dress. Here’s two websites, they really are great people and are just trying to do a lovely thing!

http://www.dressagirlaroundtheworld.com/
http://buildingchildrenofpromise.org/

Even after handing out dresses to all the girls at soup kitchen (who they would fit!) we still had a lot left over so we decided that on the way back along the road we would stop if we saw any women or girls and hand them a dress. A selfless and kind thing to do, right? Well, the police officer that pulled up behind us didn’t think so...

We had pulled over at the side of the road and I was handing a woman and her daughter two dresses out of the suitcase in the back of the truck when another vehicle was coming up behind; Ashley was shouting at me to hurry up but it was too late. I hadn’t realised the vehicle was a police truck. So the driver pulls up behind us and wants to have a chat with Ashley who is driving. She goes to his truck for about a minute and then gets back in ours with a stony look on her face, and then she says; ‘he wants me to pull up in a space ahead so he can arrest me.’
So we pull in and this bent police officer is saying how we shouldn’t stop on the road bla bla bla, we needed to pull in more bla bla bla, what were you doing, what is in the suitcase etc. We tell him all about soup kitchen, being volunteers, the dresses and that we just stopped for one second to do a nice thing. At which he says ‘I have three orphans at home, I want dresses’. Yeah, like hell you do.
He obviously wasn’t arresting anyone otherwise he would have done it straight away the first time he stopped us, so we begrudgingly gave him two dresses (folded up so he couldn’t tell we hadn’t given him a third), jumped in the truck and drove off. Some people are just evil.

I’m sorry, I haven’t really painted an accurate picture of this guys personality but he was seriously a bast*rd.

Moḉambique!

So, on the day that we were ‘almost arrested’ we stopped by a place on the road coming back from soup kitchen called Lituba Lodge. We were chatting to the owner, a guy who has lived in Swaziland for 15 years but is from Lester, England – and he was telling us how he needed to go to Mozambique to replenish his stock of seafood. As we have been wanting to go to Mozambique since getting to Swaziland we were delighted when he said that we were welcome to come along with him for the day if we were interested in seeing Maputo! Obviously we said yes we were, and so we found ourselves leaving hostel at the ridiculous time of 5:00am on Saturday morning to begin our trip to Mozambique.

Mozambique is a filty, dirty, hot, smelly and rubbish filled city, but it has an intense history which makes it an amazing place to visit. For 15 years the Mozambican population were victims of the Cold War; one million people died from fighting and starvation and over 5 million civilians were displaced. The country was speckled with landmines and many people became amputees during the time of the war; the landmines remain a legacy from the war and there are still hundreds of live landmines that continue to plague the people of Mozambique.
Mozambique finally came to peace in 1990 with the end of the cold war and the crumbling of apartheid in South Africa; but even on a day trip to Maputo you can clearly see that it is a country fighting to develop again and break away from its past and write itself a new and brighter future. Unfortunately the war scars are still fresh; you can see the amputees and victims of the war begging on the roads by traffic lights when the cars stop. Dirty ragged clothes hang off their wiry tired bodies, hurting eyes bore into you as  you sit impatiently in your air conditioned car, and you avert your own eyes while hoping for the lights to change so you can speed off and forget the torment you have just seen...

Even today Mozambique isn’t really at peace; corrupt police officers walk around with rifles strapped to their hips, their hands teasing the hilt, they make it obvious to all that they have no hesitations about using them. We experienced their corruption first hand; the Mozambican police officers are infamous for slapping outrageous fines on people (especially tourists) for things that you don’t even understand. Two officers stopped our car and tried to fine us 5,000Mt (Meticais is the currency of Mozambique) because the driver didn’t have a seatbelt on; firstly it’s not even a massive offence, secondly it is due a fine but 5,000Mt is pushing it, thirdly the officer didn’t know what he was talking about as he was shaking and unsure of himself while his partner just stood by. No fine was paid because if you know the right things to say you can pretty much talk yourself of anything.

Despite the run in with the police (again) we had an amazing day! We saw Maputo’s central train station which was designed by Eiffel himself; most of you will be more familiar with is work displayed in Paris, a little structure called the Eiffel Tower... those same cross over metal bars can be found all the way down here in Mozambique, amazing! 

Eiffel's famous style!

Next we head to central market; a crowded, dingy, buzzing hub of businesses and people who are buying, selling, haggling, cooking and basically doing everything to get by. We try a strange looking local fruit called ‘Atta’, which we have now learned was an Artichoke (I was thinking an artichoke was an anchovy, but I now stand corrected) and the sight of my camera offended one man so much that he started shouting at me in Portuguese and quite violently came at me with a flying hand to push my camera away. Wasn’t even taking a photo with it, over the top reaction or what.
Being in central market with two Swazi’s (who came along for the trip as well) felt really strange as we were now all out of our comfort zones; normally in a situation like this in Swaziland you would just get the Swazi’s to speak Siswati to the stall owners if you wanted anything, but now we were all in the same position; not understanding the language and not having the faintest clue what was going on. I was also surprised by the lack of English speakers in Mozambique; in Swaziland you are taught English from 3 years old so everyone speaks it, but in Mozambique we were getting a lot of blank stares...

'Atta'

It looks disgusting, but it was really nice! Tasted like a mix of marula, litchi and watermelon. 

After central market we hit the fish market! Not normally one of my favourite places due to the smell and all the dead fish everywhere, but because this market was open air it wasn’t quite as repellent as the Indoor Market back in Darlington. I cannot stand that place. 

So we walked around and chose our lunch; a bag full of very alive clams still squirting water over everyone, one large feisty crab and some large prawns. We then carried our own mini aquarium like children carry their ‘goldfish-in-a-bag’ at fun fairs around the corner of the fish market to ‘Costa Dol Sol’, Mozambique’s best seafood restaurant. It doesn’t look like much with the plastic garden furniture sitting on the sandy floor, old food sacks strung together as shelter and half of Mozambique’s population trying to sell you tourist junk at your table... but hell, they know how to cook seafood. 

Obviously you’ve already paid for your food at the market, so you only pay the restaurant for actually cooking the food, and all the side dishes. I’ve never been adventurous with seafood, the furthest I’ve gone is fish finger sandwiches and a good old battered fish wrapped in newspaper from the greasy chippy on the corner. So I took on the saying of ‘when in Rome’ and jumped on the Maputo seafood lovers’ bandwagon.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the food; I didn’t gag on the clams, the crab tasted lovely and I was even sucking the mush out of the prawns heads (not sure if that’s brains or what, but I really don’t want to know), and I touched it all with my hands! Touching it with my hands doesn’t sound like a massive achievement, but if you knew me before I came out to Africa you would know that I wouldn’t have been able to do that. You should see me now, ripping meat and bones apart every day with my hands! However I still haven’t faced raw chicken. 

Anyway, now I’m off subject. The seafood was great and I’m definitely going to be more daring with my menu choices from now on, maybe get rice instead of chips... hahaaaa, joking.

A little more sightseeing of Maputo led us to a buildings ruin on the beach; the story is from the film Blood Diamond. I film I haven’t seen, but apparently in the film a bar blows up... That bar was built on Maputo beach solely for the reason it was going to be blown up in the film, however I have also been led to believe that in the film it isn’t actually Mozambique where it is meant to be ‘set’ but that’s where it happened! What a waste of a fully functioning bar. So if you are familiar with Blood Diamond, I’ve been there.

To finish the day off we had a swim in the Indian Ocean, a little sunbathe and waited for 1:30mins for the worst pizza you have ever tasted in your life.  

I’m having a great time in Africa; hope you’re having fun too!

Kate xx

P.S. Name of the blog is another Aunty Rose special, check out the ‘Aunty Rose’ post for the whole thing!

Belated Halloween, Baby Birds and Bust Tyres

This week has been a true Big Bend scorcher; it’s so hot I’m sure that I sweat even as I shower – there’s a nice image for you all. The kids at Injabulo have taken to stripping off in class, so they all run around in basically no clothes and I’ve taken to fanning them with sheets of A3 laminated paper. Air-con Swazi style!

On Tuesday we took the Americans to soup kitchen with us, however I should probably stop referring to them as ‘The Americans’ because they all have names. We took the ‘young ones’ along with us; Kahlie (pronounced as Kayleigh), Blas (pronounced like the ‘blos’ from blossom) and Kent (nice easy name!) all in their twenties. They absolutely loved hanging out with the kids at soup kitchen and we handed out blankets that had been donated by their church years ago to The Moriah Centre... but had never been used! Aunty Vina was chuffed with the blankets for the orphans, and they all sang a thank you song to us, bless them.

On the same night we decided that we were going to join in on something that the Missionaries were doing, so after soup kitchen Ashley, Kahlie, Blas, Kent and myself all piled into a small bucky with a South African man named Eurie (who is an absolute legend and possibly one of the funniest men ever) and we drove out to some community in the middle of nowhere. It was dark, cold and the community was half way up the side of a hill, so it was windy as anything. Not knowing this previously I was sat there in cut-offs, a t-shirt and wearing no mosquito spray – I was in for a treat tonight.  The Missionaries were projecting ‘The Jesus Film’ onto the side of a building for the community to watch, luckily it was a remake of the original (the original is over 3 hours long), so I only had to endure being a mosquito’s midnight snack for around 1 hour and 30 minutes. It was interesting to watch though, and since we’ve been attending church every Sunday and one of the preschools we teach at is a Christian preschool there was quite a hefty amount of quotes that I could recognise for everything we’ve been teaching... I’m learning and I didn’t even realise ;) 

This week was also Halloween! Okay, Halloween was ‘officially’ last week, but we’d punctured the truck tyre so we missed the 31^st October at Injabulo. But we’d put so much effort into the lesson plan; we had printed off 60 masks, bought apples and oranges and ‘borrowed’ black bin liners from the kitchen so that we could black out the windows – couldn’t let all that work go to waste. Plus, as I’ve made you all aware Swaziland isn’t exactly a massive Halloween celebrator, I could tell them that Halloween runs alongside Easter and they’d probably just believe me ;)
We had so much fun with the kids making masks, playing ‘Stick the Spider on the Web’, apple bobbing and colouring pumpkin faces onto oranges... They loved it and Ashley even hid in the corner of the classroom with a scary mask on and jumped out on them all! There’s a fantastic video of it and they are reduced to screaming wrecks and all pile on top of one another on the floor.

Halloween masks and pumpkin oranges! Grrrrr.

Nelsiwe and Baby Ciara (Sierra), and Ciara looks happy!
She never looks happy, clearly loving Halloween :D

APPLE BOBBING!

The drive back from Injabulo turned a brilliant day slightly less brilliant; the previously punctured (then fixed) tyre decided to blow. We had to rope in some Swazi men to help us jack it up and try to pump the tyre; unfortunately the tyre was a complete goner and they said we’d have to change it. Shame that the spare tyre under the TOYOTA hasn’t seen daylight for a good few years, and they had a right hassle trying to free it! Richard and his Gardner came to the rescue after we’d called him and explained the situation... he wasn’t too happy about the wrecked tyre.

Whaaaaaaaaaat.

After we crawled back on the newly attached, old spare tyre at 40km/h we decided that we should wash the truck. We’d broken it again so the least we could do was make it look presentable. Right on time the Swazi weather kicked in and a thunderstorm and rainstorm hit us at full pelt – it was warm rain though so we had fun being out in the rain washing the truck. Ashley didn’t want her hair to get wet though, so tapping into her Swazi roots she took a bright yellow Shoprite bag and tied it around her head, sexy look! 

True Swazi right here....

Friday and Saturday were shopping days! We have finally bought all 60 Christmas presents for all the children at Injabulo, and we’re now popular customers in PEP (Swaziland’s answer to Primark, but it’s even CHEAPER). There’s not a new tyre for the truck yet, so we had to take a public Kombi to Injabulo on Friday, therefore when we did our shopping on the way back there was no way we could fit into a Kombi again with 60 backpacks and 60 pairs of shoes! Luckily the manager of PEP was lovely to us as we were big spenders (around E4000 between us, nearly £300), and she wangled us a lift back to Big Bend with someone she knew. She also let us have E100 worth of free stuff each from the shop as a thank you for pretty much clearing the shelves, haha... So we both got new pillows to replace the lame excuses for pillows that we have at hostel, and I chose some new sandals. Pretty decent, that would never happen back home.

Only 1/4 of all the shoes we bought - CUTE

Saturday we were back in PEP, all the staff said hello to us and I’m pretty sure we will be remembered in that shop from now on. This time we were buying the clothes for the children, it was so fun choosing out all the cute little tops for the girls and there are some gorgeous little shorts and vests for the boys!

Back in Big Bend we bought toys and sweets for their presents too; every £10 donated bought a child a new backpack, a pair of shoes, clothes, toys, sweets, a pencil case (with pens, colours, ruler, scissors, rubber, sharpener etc) and a folder for all of their work to go in. LIKE I SAID, SWAZILAND IS CHEAP.

So I would just like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who donated to us, you are going to make these children very happy – and I’ll make sure we get lots of pictures of them with their new presents for you all to see!

After a busy weekend we had Saturday night out to have some fun! £6, 7 drinks and two bars down we rolled up to a house party – don’t ask me who’s I have no idea. There were massive speakers in the garden blaring out African House music and there was food on, it was perfect. I tried out my African House dancing in the garden with some of the friends that we’ve made here, luckily it was dark and I’m sure people’s memories are a bit blurry, so I don’t think I embarrassed myself too much!
The late night food was salad, pap and beef – typically Swazi; the beef was spiced and it was amazing, I cannot stress how good this beef was. Everyone keeps telling me how I was going on and on about the beef, but compared to hostel beef it was heaven. It was heaven regardless. We got back around 3:30 and tucked into a doughnut that I’d bought earlier that day, and some salted crackers that were floating about my room... Need to get some decent food in for such occasions!
Either way it was a great night and took some of the stress off from our busy week, if you look really hard there are things to do in Big Bend :P

Ashley, Idumiso (works at Sisekelo) and Myself :)

ALSO MY PARCELS ARRIVED. YAY.

2 out of the 3 that should be here - result for the moment ;)

Buzzing when you find Christmas Presents from your Grandparents <3

THE AFTERMATH

I feel like I should explain the title of this post; the only mystery now is the ‘baby bird’ section of the title. At Moriah Centre on Thursday one of the boys had something in his hand, Ashley walked over to see what it was and he threw what was in his hand at her face! Turns out it was a traumatised baby bird and it flapped frantically, causing Ashley to absolutely soil her pants, scream the place down and leg it to the other side of the room. Apart from suffering only a minor heart attack she was okay, but I couldn’t believe how mean they were to this tiny bird; they kept picking it up by its wings and chucking it on the floor. So I saved it and went to hide it away from their mean little hands – there’s definitely a different attitude to animals here than there is back home.

Evil Children :( Traumatised and half dead bird.

Also this week I caught a few our boys at Injabulo throwing rocks at passing herds of cows; one it’s mean, and two it’s dangerous! The cows literally walk right through the playground area and if one of them spooked we could have a dead child on our hands. They knew I wasn’t happy with them, you should see their faces when they’re getting told off – they look like butter wouldn’t melt.

Love to you all, start sending my Christmas presents now ;)

Kate xx

P.S. I regret to inform you all that I’ve become a true Swazi and gone to the toilet out in the open. Ashley and I were desperate at Injabulo and the toilets themselves are vile, so we had to wee around the back of the toilet block. Some of the kids followed us around too (they never leave you alone!) and I’m pretty sure one of the little girls has now seen my white bum exposed to the world. How embarrassing.
It’s not even like I’ve never had a wee outside before, I have, plenty of times. But you hide to do it! There’s nowhere to hide here, and the toilet block is right next to a homestead. People might walk past and any moment and if someone looked out of their window at the right moment I’m sure they received a lovely eyeful!

"Crazy Like A White Chick"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate xx