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

Strikes Ruin Everything

I don’t think I have ever had a busier week in my life. Ever. In fact, I don’t think anyone has ever had a busier week. 

There’s so much to write I’m just going to bullet point day by day, try to give you an idea of what it’s like having run a preschool having its first graduation, on top of trying to feed and clothe 60 children and also preparing Christmas presents for children of another preschool! That’s not even mentioning the fact that everything you want to do comes up against a problem preventing you from doing it! Gah.

Monday 26^th November

·         Sort out clothes and toys left by missionaries and wrap up into parcels for all of the children at Moriah Centre.

·         Injabulo graduation practice – trying to organise 35 children into their groups and have a full run through ALL in English because Nelsiwe decided she didn’t fancy coming to preschool today!

·         Big Bend Prison – try to find out if they have a large tent/gazebo we could borrow for graduation. Big Bend Prison is terrifying, the prisoners wander around doing odd jobs like gardening and they just sit in groups and chill together – it’s not like they’re in prison at all! Safe to say Ashley and I were crapping ourselves as we were driving through the prison grounds and all the prisoners were staring at us in the truck cab. They’re not even minor criminals!

·         Hit Matata and PEP again – this is becoming a pretty regular pattern! We put loads more shoes aside for soup kitchen, but the bank wasn’t working so I couldn’t withdraw money to pay, we’ll be going back there again tomorrow to pay.

·         Cafe 1985 with Mike and his brothers to chill with them for the last time in 6 weeks!

Tuesday 27^th November

·         Graduation practice at Injabulo again, it’s looking pretty good so we’ve got high hopes for the big day!

·         Matata – PEP to buy the shoes for soup kitchen and lunchbox/juice bottle combos because most of the children don’t have anything to put their food in apart from old dirty lids. Some even have to share bowls, and when we give out seconds they come to you with their bare hands. Spar for cake ingredients for Injabulo Christmas party.

·         PANIC AT HOSTEL – we thought that the soup kitchen tub had gone missing with all the food in, so Ashley and I were running around all over like crazy ladies. Turns out the Aunties had cooked it for us and it was sat nicely simmering away on the stove, phew.

·         Claire (an American and our friend from the church we attend on Sundays), Aunty Winnie and her child and four grade 11’s from Sisekelo all piled into the bucky to come with us to soup kitchen. We handed out the shoes we had bought, and make a list of the people’s names and sizes who didn’t get any.

Wednesday 28^th November

·         Again with the graduation practice, I think the kids are getting a bit bored of running through the whole thing again and again but they don’t seem to understand the concept of STAYING IN YOUR LINE. Once they learn how to stay in between the person in front and the person behind I think I’ll pass out with shock.

·         Matata for shopping for graduation food! Possibly the largest food shop of my entire life, we had 3 trollies full of food, about 40 dead chickens and an overfriendly floor worker who was prepared to do anything for Ashley’s phone number. We spent E3515 (£250) and gained a E50 (£3.50) voucher at the till, ooo the savings! Thanks Spar, I’ll definitely be back with my E50 voucher, I wonder how I am going to spend it ALL, how nice of you to splash out on me after I spent s**tloads of money in your shop.

·         Back at hostel we spent 4 hours in the sauna of a kitchen, the main activity was sweating and the secondary activity was making cakes and sandwiches for soup kitchen. We must have baked about 300 cupcakes before giving up and chucking the rest of the cake mixture into a tray and making one massive tray bake!

Thursday 29^th November

·         Final Injabulo practice, ran it by myself as Ashley was off with the parents collecting firewood in the bush for cooking at graduation. Turns out they walked for an hour over a massive hill carrying saws, axes, babies and Ashley carted 10 litres of water in the blazing sun... Then to proceed to hack down some trees before paying off some guy to bring them and all the wood back in a truck. They were gone for 4 ½ hours! I would have died in that sun.

·         While they were all away contributing to deforestation of the world I realised that the truck tyre had another puncture. WHY WHY WHY. Our truck hates us, and Richard was going to hate us even more! In desperation I racked my mind for my car maintenance knowledge and jacked up the truck from the ground and attached the pump to the engine to blow up the tyre so we could drive home on it. The Mothers of the children at Injabulo had stayed at the preschool to clean it while the others were collecting firewood; I now think that they think Ashley and I are crazy. Ashley was out in the bush collecting firewood and I was crawling under a truck with my face in the dirt jacking it up off the floor... Definitely normal behaviour.

·         To top off our bad situation we had to pick up 250 glass bottles of soft drinks for graduation on the way back to Sisekelo, all that extra weight squished down the tyre even more and we were pretty nervous about what Richard was going to say. Luckily it was fine and he managed to get it sorted no problem.

·         BOTSWANA BOYS ARRIVE! Sam and Sam are here, they indicate (almost) the start of our Christmas travelling, buzzinggg.

·         Kathy rings us and says that the Ubombo Illovo workers are having strikes on the gates to the village, so we can’t go to soup kitchen. This is gutting because we have all the clothes, shoes, toys, nice food and even toothbrushes and toothpaste for them! We also have over 100kg of samp, rice, oil, tinned fish etc for Aunty Vina so she has supplies to feed the children at soup kitchen while we are away over Christmas. Swaziland it really making our lives difficult today.

·         Alternative plan is that we go to the club and have a swim, chatting with the Botswana Boys is really interesting – finding out what is similar in our countries but also realising that the culture is completely different in other aspects!

Friday 30^th November

·         EARLY START. Pick up the boys from Kathy and Richards; head to Nelsiwe’s house to drop off the bottles of soft drink. Head to Matata to do the shopping for the fresh food for Injabulo graduation.

·         Head back with Nelsiwe for Moriah Graduation! Quickly run back to hostel to change clotes and pick up the tray bake that we iced that morning, run back to Moriah Centre. The kids looked so cute in their gowns and hats, but Ashley and I didn’t realise that the teachers did a dance too, so we had to get up and dance along with the Moriah teachers – thanks for telling us!

·         We’re allowed to go to soup kitchen today if we break through the strike times; we hand out more clothes, shoes, toys the toothpaste and brushes and we have party food! Give Aunty Vina her Christmas supplies and we spend lots of time playing with the children – it’s really lovely. The kids warm up to Sam and Sam so by the end they’re getting loads of cuddles, cute.

·         Head to the club with the boys to meet Ayanda and Nelo; we have a braii, play some pool and get caught in torrential rain.

Saturday 1^st December

·         EARLY, LONG AND STRESSFUL DAY.

·         Matata for MASSIVE cakes for Injabulo graduation, use the E50 voucher to get it out of our faces because it is quite frankly an OFFENCE after how much we spent!

·         Arrive at graduation and the Mothers cooking say that they need other food that we didn’t buy – it wasn’t on the list so that’s why we didn’t buy it. I drive BACK to Matata to buy more food for them, and it turns out we have to pay the electricity meter for the lady who’s house we running electricity from. This turns into a problem at the post office because we can’t just pay E50 for the electricity we want to use ourselves, we have to pay off all of the ladies electricity debts BEFORE we can get our E50 – brilliant. She’d better pay us back!

·         Once I get back with the truck Ashley and Sam head off to the Royal Crawl for more chairs, unfortunately they get stuck in the mud so have to free themselves and head back without the chairs... Sam’s feet actually smell like poo from being in the mud.

·         Graduation goes amazing! The kids don’t get shy and they speak well, they have lots of energy and dance and sing, plus they look super cute in their all whites and their traditional dress! The Mothers did an amazing job with the food and everyone is well fed. 

Ummiso Cultural Dance

We had also been so excited for weeks about giving the kids their presents and finally the time was here! It was lovely seeing all their reactions to their presents, unfortunately someone had to ruin it and they stole the bags that we had put aside for the absent children for next year. What a disgrace, I don’t think Ashley or myself have been angrier since we got here. We also gave Nelsiwe her present, she knew it was coming though because she’d constantly been saying “Have you bought me a present yet?” and totally ruining the whole thing! I think she thought we weren’t getting her one so she kept going on about it, but we had and it got a bit annoying after a while because she should know that we’re not going to leave her out.

·         After graduation we have a mad rush back to hostel for a shower and change and then we run up to the kombi park and luckily catch the last kombi to Manzini for the Sisekelo Matrics after party, the big AP. It’s dead when we arrive as they’re all still at prom so we hit Nando’s up first.

·         When prom end the club hosting the AP gets pretty busy and we all have a really good time, THIS IS THE START OF THE HOLIDAYS! We hadn’t arranged any accommodation to stay in so we were planning on pulling an all-nighter and catching the first kombi back to Big Bend at 5am. By 4:30 we’re all pretty much passed out on the table because we’ve been up for 23 hours straight and we splash out on a taxi to get us back.

Sunday 2^nd December

·         Wake up at 2pm, chill, eat, chill. Go to Cafe 1985 for dinner and walk back to Kathy and Richards; on the way I manage so stand on a broken bit of wood in the dark and have a chunk of wood lodged in the side of my foot! Ew. Sam has to piggy back me to Kathy and Richards where Kathy wants to call the doctor to come and surgically remove it, but Richard decides his pliers will do the job. OH MY GOD, having that piece of wood yanked out of my foot fecking HURT. Brilliant timing Kate, how you going to carry your massive backpack if you can’t even walk properly...

So that was my week. No big deal, not much happened ;) But now it is officially time to do what Frankie says and R-E-L-A-X

DURBAN TOMORROW AYYYYYYYYYYYE!

Love to you all ma hunz,

Kate xx

SIZEZE

Let the festivities begin! Even though it is still ridiculously early to be thinking about Christmas, we have to. Because the schools finish before December even begins we have to fit all of the Christmas themed activities into November. At Injabulo we braved the paint for the first time (much more risky than crayons!) and my worries were confirmed – water was spilt everywhere, paints were wrecked, paint was splattered everywhere and it was a total disaster. I think the kids enjoyed themselves though!
They’ve successfully made stockings, Santa Claus on a wreath, cotton wool snowmen and Christmas baubles – quite impressive for a large bunch of easily distracted 3-5 year olds.

The people who work in PEP must be getting sick of us now, we’ve been back AGAIN for more shoes for soup kitchen, and we found they have a lunchbox/water bottle combination for about 60p so we bought up all the stock they had of them too!

We’re also becoming more and more Swazi by the day; the kombi that has been donated to Moriah Centre is now back on Swazi soil, and Ashley and I have been allocated as its drivers. You can’t get much more Swazi than driving a kombi around, however you do get lots of people trying to wave you over at the side of the road and then look at us confusedly when they realise that there are two white girls in charge of a kombi! Might pull into the kombi park next time and shout ‘MATATA MATATA’ for the banter, try and charge people for a journey, hahaa.

Soup Kitchen has been crazy this week; we’ve had an influx of new children and teenagers... Apparently word has been getting out that the two white girls at soup kitchen are buying everyone clothes and shoes, so people are starting to turn up thinking that they’re going to get some handouts. So our numbers have been bumped up from about 50-60 on an average day to around 80!
The tough decision is whether or not we actually do give them something, it would be nice if they made the effort to come to soup kitchen as regulars, but then again they might be looking after younger siblings at home and they can’t physically make it. Do we give them clothes and shoes even though they’re only turning up BECAUSE  they think they’re going to get clothes and shoes, or do we say ‘sorry, no you can’t have’?  Aunty Vina is well informed on people’s home situations, but then again we don’t have the money to clothe the whole of Mpolongeni community! However if Aunty Vina says they are needy (which most of them are), then I guess we buy for them... That’s what this work is all about, giving help to those who need it the most.
On the way to soup kitchen on Tuesday we were pulled over by police for the very first time! It was just a random maintenance vehicle check, but we were pretty nervous because we had Sisekelo students in the back of the truck... Luckily Ashley had her licence (sometimes we forget, but you’re meant to carry it everywhere with you when you’re driving) and everything was okay. She did get a little bit flustered though and when the Policewoman asked for her to test the indicators she accidently flicked on the windscreen wipers! Easy mistake.

Friday was the first day that we started handing out our wares at soup kitchen; we decided to shift all of the second hand clothes that we had been collecting from the Sisekelo students so we had more time to hand out the nice things that we had actually bought with money. 

The girls were really civilised about taking the clothes, however they got embarrassed when we were handing out the bras that we’d been given, none of them wanted any! Ashley and I thought that it was really strange because surely teenage girls would be grateful for a bra, but it seems that that isn’t the case.
The boys were the opposite of the girls, they were mental. Pushing, screaming, fighting, snatching... everything. We’d even explained that everyone was going to get something, but they just didn’t want to be polite about it. Every time I lifted up an item of clothing to have a look at the size about 20 hands all came up and started grabbing and pulling the clothes; it wasn’t nice at all.
Sometimes when we try to do something nice for soup kitchen I still don’t feel good about it; giving out the clothes should make me feel happy because we’re giving the children something that they don’t have something that will benefit them... but it makes me feel awful. The way they desperately snatch clothes from you and from one another makes me realise they’re in such a dire situation they’re willing to do anything to gain. Larger boys pull clothes off the smaller boys, clothes that won’t even fit them, JUST so that they have something. It breaks my heart and makes me wonder what sort of effects poverty really has on a person. Just how far would they go to try and improve their own situation? Here they are pulling clothes off each other like wild animals, even though they are all friends and they all know how hard they have it, how tough their lives are. Something takes over them and they aren’t the same children I know and love and see every week, which is a shame because I want to feel good when we give them surprises, not feel shocked.

Injabulo Christmas party was also this week! We had so much fun with the kids, they all made little party hats to wear and then they all sat down at their little tables to have some party food; cheese and ham sandwiches, crisps, biscuits and icing, jelly and lolly pops... Lots of really healthy food obviously. Shoprite  doesn’t sell straws and they wouldn’t  donate us any of the free ones you get when you buy a drink so Ashley and I had stolen loads of them just to make a point that we couldn’t be defeated and we used them in a sucking Jelly race at Injabulo. It was the funniest thing ever watching 50 kids all with their faces in plates of jelly trying desperately to finish first, and the SOUND, wow.

This Saturday brought the Swaziland vs. Botswana National Rugby match! We caught a kombi to Manzini and walked to the Mavuso Sports Centre – our friend Mike is the Captain of the rugby team and his two brothers are also part of the team. It was Swaziland’s first National home game in 6 years, and we started off with high hopes for them. Then we saw the Botswana team... they dwarfed Swaziland’s team with their massive guys and we became more doubtful of how the game was going to go.
Unfortunately Swaziland were creamed by Botswana, but they’re a young team and it was the first time they had all played together, so there’s room for improvement!
Mike’s parents gave us free ‘Sizeze vs. Botswana’ t-shirts though, so that was pretty awesome! Sizeze is the rugby teams nickname, and also the name of the Swaziland spear.

Looking fat but whatever... This is Mike (on the right) and one of his brothers.

The Dos Santos Family! Mikes family, they are actual legends.

Next week is going to be stressful as hell, but it’s almost the Christmas holidays so it’s time to really knuckle down before we have 6 weeks of travelling!

Kate xx

Chasing the Sunset

The sun disappears too quickly here! Managed to catch some pictures with it on the way back from Soup Kitchen though. 

"WHEELBARRA"

Delivery of our wheelbarrow present to Aunty Vina! So she can transport water from the river for the orphans.

Soup Kitchen

Today we went to soup kitchen for the first time. It's really rough. I came away feeling pretty upset.
So far we've only really seen Big Bend (which is fairly well off due to the sugar cane plantation and the sugar mill business), so this came as a shock. It's even more rural than the Injabulo project, it's in the middle of nowhere.
We were greeted by Aunty Vina, a lady who oversees the soup kitchen because she runs an orphanage in some buildings on the plot of land that we serve off. She does an amazing job with the kids considering how little there is, but the extent of the poverty here did really hit home today.
The houses that the children live in have no doors, and we found out that snakes getting in is a really common problem for them. Two little boys showed us massive snake bite scars that they had, it was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. I asked Vina if it had been a Black Mamba and she said no, therefore I thought that it may have been a big snake but one that wasn't as dangerous... But it wasn't. Turned out they were cobra bites and they'd actually found a snake in one of the rooms just the night before. I really can't fathom this, doors are such simple things and these children are sleeping every night with the risk of receiving a deathly snake bite.

Most of the children didn't have shoes either and today was cold and rainy, it was such a depressing sight being up at the soup kitchen and realising just how lucky you are. These children have nothing but they manage to find joy out of the simplest things. We were again asked to dance; this set the children off laughing and imitating what we were doing. They really are amazing people, even in their situation they are still some of the most friendly and lively people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Now, I know that this isn't nearly as important as the children but another thing that just added to the sadness of visiting soup kitchen was the puppies. There are a lot of dogs roaming about Aunty Vinas land and I presume that one of them had puppies. There was a pile of breeze blocks with some corrugated steel over the top and I could hear this wailing and crying coming from inside. When we went over to check it out there were 5 puppies inside, sodden hungry and shaking. Their crying was the backing track to the whole visit, it was absolutely heart-breaking.

On the plus side there is so much that we can improve on at soup kitchen and we know that these people will really see the benefits. Even the smallest things such as buying Aunty Vina a wheel barrow will really help them out... it's so she can transport water from the river 2km away to her vegetable patch which she grows to make food for the children. A wheel barrow. When you think about the world is really is appalling how unbalanced everything is.

I really hope we can make a change here.

Kate xxx

Ashley at Soup Kitchen

The puppies :( CRY.

Soup Kitchen 2nd Visit: 

Baby girl belonging to one of the women at Soup Kitchen

The boys with their new football that Ashley bought for them to play with :)