Leadership Camp (Shear Rock Adventures)

Leadership Camp, okay. In a nutshell Sisekelo High School decide that the best way to pick Prefects and the Head Boy and Girl is to put all of their Grade 11's through two and a half days of actual hell and see who comes out the other side alive. The course is compulsary (haha) and it is definately worth it because being a Prefect has it's perks. However, neither Ashley or myself are ever going to be a Prefect at Sisekelo, no matter how alive we are at the end... we just did it for the laughs.

Monday

Wake up at 5am, get breakfast and pack the bus for 5:30 (want to die), travel to Hawane. Not Hawaii as I first thought, so I began the whole experience feeling rather underwhelmed.
Arrive at Hawane Resort, it's really nice... But we're not staying in the nice part. We get sorted into groups of 5 and get given a mattres in a horse stable. Hilarious.
Get sorted into teams... PINK TEAM. We get bandannas to wear, yaaaaaay! That is getting tied around my head Rambo style. Sorted.
Play loads of team building games, one of which includes rolling over each other across a field. I honestly think I slipped a disc in my spine at one point, these Grade 11 lads are not small.
Later on we go on a walk and get told to wear clothes that we don't mind getting muddy. They were being serious. We were all taken to a Swazi Nature Reserve with a lake, the lake was surrounded by think clay mud which we were made to sprint in and play murder ball in! It was great; did a little bit of exfoliating, drew some warrior mud stripes on my face, I was loving it. Loving it so much that when the girls wanted to write their names on my back and arms with the mud I was like 'hell yeah, go for it'... Later on I realised this was a massive mistake.
Shower time is the single thing that has confused me the most about being in Swaziland. Back home when the showers are full you line up and wait for one to come free. After standing in the girls toilets/shower room for about 10 minutes and watching as girls ran past me screaming into occupied showers I concluded that they do it differently here... I decided to give up. Instead I had a wash in the trough sinks outside the bathroom, these are very public. Embarassing. Ashley had to clean my muddy back while I layed across this sink half naked for everyone to see :(
Dinner - another team building or character building exercise. The situation was that we had survived an aeroplane crash. We had to pick un-labeled tins blindly out of a box and hack them open with two blunt knives. We also had a loaf of bread per team and some cups to tip the contents of the tins in. Everyone who knows me knows that I like to know what I'm eating, and opening tins in the pitch black and smelling them to guess the contents isn't my idea of a decent meal, or a fun time. It was horrible. It was the worst thing I had to do the entire course. It was especially bad when we acciently mixed tinned peaches with cold baked beans, and when I stuck my fingers in this can to pull out the contents and it was some sort of rotting stinking fish. The smell didn't go away, not until the next day when my hands were covered in cow shit... But I'll get to that in a bit.
So right now I'm smelling of fish, covered in mud and have been up for 16 hours. Obviously it's time to go and create war cries and play mental games in the conference room. Ugh. After that we watch a south african comedian's set (he was really funny when I understood the situations he was on about!) and a relevant film about leadership (some American Football film), and it gets stopped every half our for the camp leaders to make sure that everyone is awake... "Because leaders have to learn how to stay awake even when they are tired." All I want to do right now is sleep. And we get to, at like 12am.

Tuesday

Get woken up at 6:45 by a vuvuzela, an experience I never wish to repeat in my life. We are then dragged out of the stables to go to another set of stables (with horses) to feed and groom them in the freezing cold.
Now, here's something you need to know about Hawane - yes it's in Africa, but it's in the highvelds of Swaziland which have a slightly surreal climate. Monday was boiling hot, like BOILING. Tuesday however brought rolling mist and cold temperatures even by UK standards. This I was not prepared for. We went for some crazy blind folded walk up the side of a mountain where we were all tied together in our teams and the person at the front had to lead (with no blind fold obviously). So there I was on the side of a mountain, tied to my team, with a blind fold on and a pair of leggins wapped around my neck as a makeshift scarf... And then on the walk back down we're told to fill a bucket with fresh cow shit. I'm seriously not in the mood.
Turns out that the cow poo is for later, we have to make 6 bricks out of the stuff, and everyone has to touch the poo bucket :( So in team spirit I get stuck in so that we don't lose points... At least the fishy smell is gone now. After everyone started off touching the poo quite timidly, it sure as hell didn't take long until the orange team decided to chuck their poo at us in lovely pooballs. One poor girl on my team got one right in her face, i've never seen such a sad sight! This quickly turned into a full scale war and the camp leaders took cover inside... Well that escalated quickly.
Shower incident was the same. I washed my feet in the sink and declared myself clean. There was also a slightly awkward moment when Aunty Rose (one of the cooks from the kitchen, we call them Aunties) asked me to tell one of the camp leaders to turn the stove off. This doesn't sound awkward, but it was... She flung the shower curtain open when I came out the toilet and confronted me with this request fully naked. I seriously didn't know what to do, the shock paralysed me. That's another thing I've learned about Swazi women, when they're together they don't have any qualms about nakedness, we've already seen many a naked girl running screaming down corridoors because her friend snatched her towel away from her. This is something I will never get used to.
One of the camp leaders cracked out his guitar and all the boys began singing the chorus to 'Hero' by Enrique Inglesias, they all ran en-masse down the stables and serenated the girls... They murdered it, but it was pretty funny.
For dinner we had a braii (a BBQ) and froze our asses off because the only place to eat is outside on picnic benches, it was so misty I couldn't even see my own plate.
Conference room again. Another team building game that included puzzles and ended in a full scale riot. If anyone says that puzzles are boring, they clearly haven't played this game. We then had another film (Cool Runnings! It's really funny) and got sent to bed late again.

Wednesday

Final Day! The vuvuzela came out again -_- and we had to feed the horses, again. But this time we got a ride! The students are really freaked out by horses and the girls ran around squealing whenever they came near, this spooked the horses into another direction which created more screaming... it was a vicious circle.
More physical games with no breakfast, some girl fainted from overheating and we got food! Yay. They are crazy here, (this day was hot) they walk around in massive hoodies and coats when it's like 30 degrees, that's not even cold. At all.
Had a massive tug of war and my team won! Because of me clearly. Then all the girls took the boys on and we beat them every time... Seriously, this isn't a joke, even I was surprised! They weren't happy about it, seeing as the whole of the Grade 11 boys rugby team was also included in their numbers! Hahahhaaaa.
Another school arrived as we were leaving and this lad jumped out of a minibus window to beat one of Sisekelo's lads up, Aunty Rose was screaming "it's like being in a movie!" I actually love this woman.
Bus journey back was hell, I drank too much juice and we had to stop at KFC in Manzini cause I was on the verge of wetting myself right there in the bus. In Swaziland they have security guards on the toilet doors who only let you wee if you buy something, I hopped around and pleaded until he let me in, I think he knew the alternative would include him and a mop and the KFC floor. Had to use the men's though, ladies was full and I was in a dire situation. Hawane to Manzini was the most uncomfortable and terrifying 45 minutes of my life, Ashley slept through my pain and Aunty Rose found it funny as hell, she told me it made her day and did impressions of me to all the other Aunties when we arrived back home. They howled at me for about 5 minutes. I see the humor though!

Well, that was Leadership Camp... Sorry it's so long but so much happened!
Kate xxx