Swaziland Facts!

Hopefully I will continue adding to this list as I find out more and more about this fascinating country:

• If you have western money, Swaziland is pretty cheap!
• Everything is slow in Swaziland - internet, service, waiting for food etc :P
• Everything has so many additives! The jam is bright red, the yoghurts are bright green and bright yellow and they have a drink called Cabana which is basically Sunny D - yeah, that was banned in the UK ;)
• The custard creams here are amazing! You can get so many different flavours on the inside; mango, strawberry, orange, lemon, peach... basically anything. NOM.
• There are literally no road rules. You get where you want to by driving however you want to. Kombi's (public transport minibuses) are the fastest thing on the road, and they have the most passengers. Also, don't trust the power of zebra crossings. They mean nothing.
• Cows and goats really like being on the road, you gotta slow down or you'll be eating beef/goat for a year!
• Pap is nice. I actually like it. It looks like mash potato but is made from maize.
• Everyone will talk to you!
• THE FRUIT JUICE IS AMAZING. So many flavours, so good.
• 'Excuse me' doesn't really come into it that much, if you want to get something or move somewhere just push yourself through... If you don't you're getting nowhere! SERIOUSLY there's not even a word in SiSwati for 'excuse me'.
• Eat peanut butter. You need the energy.  
• The Swazi's love TOYOTA. If you see a truck that isn't a TOYOTA you've done extremely well. It's like being in Cornwall and spotting VW camper vans - they're everywhere.
• Apparently the mesh bags that you get oranges in are really good to use when washing up. Cheaper than buying a cloth I guess!
• Socks and sandals are a common fashion choice :(
• 'Boy racers' are virtually non-existent in Swaziland, low cars and body kits mean that you're not going to get anywhere fast on these roads/tracks. 
• Ladies use towels to strap their babies to their backs, and they tie the towel at the front! I'll have to get a picture of it, it really is funny; from the front all you see are these two little feet sticking out on the ladies hips, cute. 
• After our trip to Manzini I concluded that Kombi's are the quickest, cheapest, most efficient and probably the best public transport I will ever use, no matter where you are you can always find one to where you need to go, and if you can't you just stand by the side of the road and flag one down to hop on. Yes the experience is slightly terrifying at times, but you get used to overtaking cars at 120km/h over speed bumps into oncoming traffic. 
• In Swaziland KFC's (not very African I know, but don't judge me) they have chilli salt. It is amazing. 
• Regional Slang - everyone here says 'shame', it can mean; what a shame, cute, aww etc, I really don't know if they're being positive or negative :/
  'Is it' is also popular - e.g. 'Did you have a good day?' 'Yes thanks, we were teaching at Injabulo and put 30 kids in the truck!' 'Is it?' I think it means 'oh really' or 'did you really' or something.
  When organising times -
  'Just now' - sometime in the near future, could be an hour, could be this afternoon, could even be the evening, it's not very clear!
  'Now now' - is right now, if I'm on my way 'now now' it means I'm walking to your house at that moment in time, whereas if I'm coming 'just now' I probably haven't even showered or dressed yet :P
• Pretty much every car in Swaziland is white, which doesn't make sense because they're all absolutely filthy all the time. Why don't they just buy darker cars? Turns out that it's cheaper to buy a car in white than in any other colour... fair enough. 
• Experienced a Swazi version of a mean playground trick at Injabulo. Remember when the boys used to chase the girls with worms and everyone screamed their heads off? Yeah, here the boys do that with dead snakes on sticks! Never heard such a noise in my LIFE. 
• I was really surprised when I saw little girls at Moriah Centre taking baby dolls, putting them on their backs and tying the dolls to themselves with strips of material around their waists! It seemed like such a sad and grown-up thing to do, because they were copying how all the women carry their babies around. Then I realised it is just like little girls back home with push chairs and dollies, but even the smallest actions these children do they keep reminding of the scale of the cultural differences! 
• After talking about the above fact Ashley and I realised that since being here we have NEVER seen a man with a child. Not carrying one, not even with one... just never. 
• Men and women don't really go around together, I've only ever seen one couple holding hands. The people here tend to be alone or in a group of people of the same sex. 
• A rainy day is a day off. Swazi's don't do ANYTHING when it rains, all they do it put the fire on in their house and sleep. This is even for a little drizzle. One day at soup kitchen the kids decided that because it was raining they weren't going to sing, even though they had to stand in the rain anyway... just, why.
• Hostel Slang - 'churfs' refers to the boy you are 'seeing', or refers to hot boys in general. For example 'how's churfs?' asking about the boyfriend, or 'look at those churfs over there!'
  L.O.G means 'low on guava', which in turn means that you haven't kissed anyone in a while! Don't worry, I don't really understand it either.
• 'Cherry' is a girl. 'If that cherry comes anywhere near my boyfriend I'll go crazy!'
• 'Pawpaw' is what the Swazi's call papaya for short.
• THE KING IS EVERYWHERE. He is on the traditional clothes that the Swazi's wear, his name is everywhere and without fail every shop/bar/cafe/restaurant that you go into (anywhere) there will be his picture up on the wall for everyone to see with 'King Mswati III' written on it, just in case anyone is nipping into Spar for their milk and bread and they forget who runs their country. I mean he is the King, I understand that - but we have a Queen, and she's not mounted on the wall in Sainsburys'. 
• Drinks cans are deceivingly heavy :( You think you've got about a quarter of a can left but it's totally empty, I think they must make the metal thicker on the bottom. CRY.
• Kuteka (pronounced goo-tec-ah) is a Swazi tradition which basically involves tricking a girl into marrying your son! What happens is when the girl is 'sleeping over' with your son, the parents gather all the family, neighbours and community outside the house. They pull the girl out of the house pretty early (around 4am) and they taunt her, say horrible things and call her names until she cries. Once she cries she is 'accepting' everything that has been said and is now married to the son. If she is strong willed and manages not to cry, she is put in something called a 'kraal' (pronounced like crawl). It's a wooden enclosure (basically a cage), and the taunting is carried on until the tears eventually appear... Don't worry! I don't really understand it either! Apparently you can't run away either, because all the gathered community grab you and keep you there. The moral of the story is, don't risk the sleeping at the house part.    
• When you're driving along the road and you smell burning, it's normally because you're driving past a field that is totally on fire. The first time I saw this I was like 'WHAT THE FUUU----'! But it's a controlled fire, the workers on the sugar cane plantations burn the fields before harvesting. 
• When sugar cane is being transported on massive cane trucks, they normally fill them to the point where they are overflowing. A bonus to us is that you can pick up sticks of sugar cane from the side of the road, strip the bark with your teeth and chew as you walk! I made the mistake of thinking you actually swallow it though, and resulted on me choking on bits of bark in my throat :( You only chew the bark, then spit it out... There's a handy tip for anyone thinking about visiting Swaziland. Don't swallow sugar cane. 

2013

• Everyone in the rural areas in Swaziland appears to have this problem - not being able to apply 'she' or 'he' to the correct gender. When talking about their husbands women generally refer to them as 'she', and when talking about their female children then refer to them as 'he'! Can't get it right. 
• These Africans go crazy for Tupperware, they love the stuff. Nelsiwe our other Injabulo teacher has a cupboard full of it, all on display. 
• I've noticed that Swazi women don't appear to shave their armpits.
• Instead of 'spreading' butter on their sandwiches, they 'paste' them! As Nelsiwe once said to us, "these sandwiches haven't been pasted", no Nelsiwe they haven't, peanut butter is not glue and I don't intend sticking them to the walls! Hahahaaa.
• The Swazis love their litchi fruits! 
• Many of the older Swazi men have their smallest fingernail REALLY long, and all of the others are short. I don't know if this is a cultural or traditional thing because the security guard that I questioned about it said "I don't know, I just like looking at mine. It's nice." 
• For some reason some kombi drivers attach bottles of Fanta and Coca Cola to the outside of their minibus, maybe they don't have cup holders... I really don't know, I still haven't worked this one out. 
• When giving or receiving something (e.g. money) it is polite to put your left hand onto your right forearm while accepting the thing into your right hand (or vice versa). 
• 'Umlungu' means white person, the original meaning comes from the white foam off the sea that collects along the beach! Hahaa, kids shouted this at us as we got onto a kombi, brilliant.
• 'Shisa Nyama' - literally means 'burn the meat' but can be used to describe cooking meat, having a braii or literally just means hot meat!
• According to what the Grandparents used to say (and old Swazi myths/stories); when it rains at the same time that the sun is out... it is when the monkeys get married. 
• Lebola - when a young man wants to marry a young girl he must get permission from the girl's father and pay him 'lebola' - this is traditionally a certain number of cattle, but now tradition has changed at it can also be the monetary value of a certain amount of cattle (or a bit of cattle and a bit of money!)
• 'Cheese girls' and 'cheese boys' - a way of describing the richer kids who are on the 'soft' side, i.e. those that have maids/cooks and don't really do anything for themselves. 

“Remember, it’s a racist dog. It bites white people.”

This week has been a pretty uneventful week for us; some local news from this week is that on Monday a leopard had been spotted running around on the loose just outside of Big Bend. It had been having the time of its life on a cattle murdering spree, so apparently the local farmers were pretty angry.

We've also been introduced to Wandile, the son of Siphewe a teacher at Moriah Centre. Siphewe is rather fond of the idea of Wandile marrying Ashley, and is now always telling her that she can’t wait to put red paint on her cheeks (something Swazi to do with marriage I'm guessing!)

Ashley received her first packages from home this week (so I'm really jealous because mine are still nowhere to be seen), so we had a stroll up to the Big Bend Post Office. In Swaziland nothing gets delivered to your house or homestead, you have to go and collect it yourself; packages, letters, bills... EVERYTHING. Her Mum had sent out footballs and football strips for the kids, so she counted them out and set about the hard task of picking who was going to get one.
Getting the kids into their new football strips at soup kitchen was actually hilarious; this one poor lad was trying to pull on his new shorts over the top of his trousers, which then prompted Aunty Vina to go over to him, keg him in front of everyone (wasn't wearing any pants, bless him!) and pull the new shorts onto a now very embarrassed little boy. They all looked so happy in their new kits though!

All week Ashley and I had been looking forward to this weekend because the plans were to have a weekend away in Durban! We’d been forward planning on the internet what we were going to do, and were excited (and apprehensive) about visiting the boys at the Boys Town project. Unfortunately the plans fell through and we couldn't go in the end, which is probably for the best because on Thursday night I became ill for the first time of being here in Swaziland; this included sleeping on the hostel toilet floor because it was too risky being in my room as I didn't fancy clearing sick up off my things the next morning. 

Ashley managed to go to Injabulo by herself on Friday to teach with Nelsiwe while I was sprawled out in bed trying to keep my stomach inside my body. I also woke up to a really cute phone call from Ashley and the kids at Injabulo; she got them to shout “Hallo Aunty Kate” and “get better soon” which put a little smile on my face!
As well as being told to drink lots of water, take rehydration packets, drink energy drinks and drink lots of black tea, Aunty Rose concocted some disgusting mixture of water, sugar and salt for me to ingest. Apparently it’s some sort of home-made rehydration drink, safe to say it didn't taste too great; but feeling as bad as I did I downed it with the same enthusiasm as downing a dirty pint and then went back to sleep. Some weekend.

I’m looking forward to this coming week though, hopefully my package from home will arrive (I check our pigeon hole for the Post Office slip in vain every day), and on Wednesday we’re having a Halloween themed day with the kids at Injabulo! We've been collecting apples for apple bobbing, oranges for drawing pumpkin faces on, printed off Halloween masks, ghosts and gravestones and we’re going to cover the windows with black bin bags! Unfortunately we’re not too sure that the kids will understand what is happening, even though it is apparent that there’s a lot of superstition over witchcraft in Africa, no one actually seems to have heard of Halloween. Aunty Rose assured us that she understood... “I know Halloween, when the children’s all do a play, yes. I know I know!” We’re pretty sure that she doesn't understand, and I think she’s going on about a Christmas Nativity... so it looks like it’s time to introduce some Swazi’s to the concept of Halloween! 

This currently includes Ashley putting on the masks we printed off for the kids, calling hostel girls to her room and scaring the crap out of them. It’s pretty damn funny, and we've already had one girl drop her carton of juice all over the floor only to end up down there herself milliseconds after!

Trick or Treat

Kate xx

Christmas Box Appeal

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151117239557562.446457.651857561&type=1

If you can spare £10 you can sponsor one of these little children for a Christmas Box! Words cannot describe how much they will appreciate it as they literally have nothing at all. Make a kid's face light up at Christmas by liking/commenting on their picture on this Facebook album at getting £10 to my lovely Mum some way, somehow. Even if you don't have Facebook please feel free to still sponsor, all you have to do is get the £10 to my Mum and we will do the rest to make sure they get a little something this Christmas :D

Thank you so much! xxx

Aunty Rose

Aunty Rose is one of the cooks in the kitchen at hostel, she is so amazing that I have to do a post about her! She's absolutely stark raving crazy and has the most insane laugh I've ever heard in my life, I'll have to get it on video at some point, it doesn't even sound like it comes from a human.

• She has twin daughters; their English names are Debbie and Debra. Aunty Rose doesn't understand that Debbie is basically a nickname for someone called Deborah, and both her daughters technically have the same name. We can't make her see sense!
• Aunty Rose completely lied to us and misled us about her 'son'. Here we were thinking that she had a 5 year old son, only to be told by the other Aunties that she doesn't. Who was this kid we were introduced to calling her Mum? Turns out that it's her Grandson, but because she brought him up he sees her as a mother figure, Aunty Rose - why you so confusing!
• She calls both me and Ashley 'baby', which I love! Well, she calls lots of people baby, but still <3
• She doesn't just call me 'Kate', it usually comes out as 'Katie-Katie-Kate', with baby thrown on the end! She is so cute. 
• When we cook for soup kitchen we sing with Aunty Rose, her favourite song is Adele's Someone Like You so we absolutely belt it out while we're sweating like fat kids in a disco cooking our massive pot of soup. She always shouts at us at the end to stop though, because we'll make her cry (she sings it with her daughters as well), but then she sets us off on round 2, and we sing again!
• She has a small dog at home, which she named 'Teddy-bear', she sleeps with it as well. This is just Aunty Rose all over, she's beautifully mental.  
• Aunty Rose (and most Swazi's) aren't too familiar with the concept of Halloween; most are up-front with their lack of understanding, but Aunty Rose was adamant that she knew what it was - a play that children perform and the adults all watch. I really don't think she does understand as her idea of Halloween sounds like a Christmas Nativity! 

Aunty Rose 2013!

•  Before we left for our travelling Aunty Rose was off sick from work for a few days; we found out that the reason she was off was because she ate red meat even though she was allergic! She was at Kathy (our hosts) leaving dinner and everyone had red meat, she was jealous because it looked so good and she ate some! Silly woman.
• Debbie and Debra her twin daughters were telling us that at New Years she went to some car races and kept phoning them only to scream loudly and say no words. Apparently she couldn’t talk for two days afterwards.
• Aunty Rose keeps telling us how we can turn morvite (porridge) into Umcombotsi a Swazi beer. She walks around the kitchen brandishing a cup or porridge singing ‘Umcombotsi umcombotsi the swazzziii beeeeeer!’
•  Aunty Rose has a new granddaughter! She was telling us how Sego (her grandson) reacted; “Sego’s crazzzzy! No one can touch my babay, s’my baby! Bought it from the shop. It’s expensive!” “How much Sego?” “Heeeeey I don’t know!” They are a pretty hilarious family.
•  Aunty Rose was talking to us about Swazi beer (again) and then suddenly started saying “backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards... ahhh the banana’s sticking!” Yes, this is an euphemism/innuendo.
• We walk into the kitchen one day to find all of the Aunties absolutely killing themselves laughing, so Aunty Rose shows us what all the fuss is about... On her phone she shows us a naked picture of herself sleeping! It was taken by her daughters and bluetoothed to her phone; “Ey I was so tired, was lying there like I was drunk! I had the baby here (imitates tucked under her armpit), I nearly killed the baby!” 
• Since seeing Aunty Rose naked in the shower at leadership camp all those months ago there was one thing that I didn’t see...  Unfortunately I have now been presented with it (the photo was taken pretty much between her legs), and there’s not one inch of Aunty Rose that is a mystery to me. She’s not even embarrassed, she’s shown basically all the staff the picture!
•  Ashley and Aunty Rose:
  “Hey Aunty Rose, do you want to learn some Chinese?” “No I don’t want to karate.”“I mean the language...”“All Chinese is karate!” 
• Ashley was chatting to Aunty Rose about when she went to the casino in Durban with her Mum and Paul... "Yeah the chips are only R10!" (10 rand is the equivalent of 70p), Aunty Rose was then appalled at this because she thought that Ashley was talking about chips/crisps that are sold for R1 (7p) in Swaziland, rather than gambling chips. "Ey this thing! Too expensive!" Hahahaaaa bless her.  

The Inedible Cake.

“It’s all fun and games until someone shits themselves and has to walk home naked.”

I’m getting pretty good at handling large numbers of Swazi children by myself now; on Monday I had 53 to myself again! We also had a little accident at Injabulo; one of the little boys was crying but we couldn’t understand why... Then just as we were tiding up after teaching Nelsiwe comes over and tells us that he’s upset because he’s wet himself, great. So we give her some water so she can splash him down... Then Nelsiwe asks us for some soap and a cloth because ‘it’s all down the back of his legs’, this doesn’t fit in with the wetting himself story.
Turns out that there was a slight miscommunication and this poor boy had actually pooed himself! We went outside to find him stood in a bowl of water, completely starkers, embarrassed and still crying. Nelsiwe gave him a good wipe down and then we sent him on his way; for some reason he chose not to put back on his top which was un-soiled and went home wearing nothing but his birthday suit! Shame.  

It’s now about 7 weeks in and we’ve only just discovered that the radio in our truck actually works! We’ve found a half decent East Coast South African station that has some really weird adverts, but they play decent English and American music. So we’re having great fun cruising along in the African sun with our windows down, belting it out to some songs!

We also took Tracey and Agnes (teachers from Moriah Centre) along with us to soup kitchen; we had a lovely time with the kids all in a big circle chanting ‘DANCE BABY DANCE, DANCE BABY DANCE’ to which they all took turns going into the middle of the circle and they danced their little hearts out. We also played this game where they all ran around screaming ‘there’s a fire on the mountain, run run run’ which ended with about 30 kids throwing themselves on top of Ashley and myself in a massive pile on... I still don’t understand the aim of the game, all I know is that when it was finished I was covered in dirt, children and aching everywhere!

There’s also been another one of Swaziland’s frequent and impressive thunderstorms, only this time with the side effect that I can now access the school wifi on my laptop! I then had a skype session with Lucy, and spent the first 10 minutes looking really confused that I even had access to the internet.
The second side effect of the thunderstorm is that when we came to drive to Injabulo on Wednesday the bridge that we cross the river on was completely non-existent. Ayanda was with us in the back of the truck and she hates crossing the river at the best of times, so she was freaking out and shouting that if we tried to cross it she’s strangle Ashley with her bare hands (who was driving) and get out to walk home! Hahaa, we literally couldn’t see the bridge, so crossing wasn’t an option... We had to go back into Big Bend and go the long way around.

Normally a bridge here, oh maaaaan.

This weekend is mid-term for Sisekelo, so everyone in hostel goes home for a long weekend, apart from Ashley and I. Hostel is so creepy when there’s no one around! We felt a bit lonely without the girls there; but Selma had asked us to dog sit for her, so we got to sleep at her house and cook for ourselves which was pretty cool, however it made us realise that if we had to fend for ourselves all the time we probably would struggle! There was also one day where we had cooked our lunch and sat down outside in the sunshine to eat it before realising that the dogs were nowhere to be seen. S**t. We’d lost them.
We looked all over the grounds before asking a security guard if he’d seen anyone drive down; turns out that Selma’s sister had come along in her car and taken them for a walk or something, we were so worried that we were responsible for 3 lost dogs. We also found out that while we’d been looking after them they’d viciously murdered a cat one night when we’d been out, but we hadn’t realised. Worst dog sitters ever.

Kathy and Richard took us to Hlane on Saturday! Hlane is a Nature Reserve up country, and it was so muddy we were skidding everywhere; sometimes we were horizontal to the tracks we were travelling on... If it hadn’t been for Richards impeccable rally driving skills I could’ve easily seen myself up to my ankles in mud pushing a truck for the second time in as many weeks. We saw rhino’s, crocodiles, hippo’s, giraffe, impala (impala are everywhere, I’m sick of the sight of them!) and dung beetles, which are the most hilarious beetle I think I’ve ever seen in my life. They push along balls of dung 3 times the size of them like children rolling up snow at winter to make a snowman. They choose to roll their dung balls right along the middle of the tracks, so Richard was playing a dodging game to try and avoid flattening them to the floor. 

Dung Beetle!

The Queen Mother was also meant to be having lunch at Hlane, so there were large numbers of security men walking around admiring the hippos and waving around massive guns. We also had an argument with a group of men in Swazi cultural dress over whether or not the crocodile next to the watering hole was in fact a crocodile or a large lizard. It was a crocodile, it was obvious and there’s no doubt that fact; but they seemed to think that it was only a lizard. I really worry about these Africans sometimes, no wonder loads of them get eaten by crocodiles, they’re walking around thinking that they’re harmless lizards!

Sunday was a calmer day; we spent the morning baking a birthday cake for Mary at Moriah Centres birthday, only to discover that after our first attempt we are rubbish bakers. It probably didn’t help that I’d accidently used a ‘Microwavable Recipes’ book without realising, and that the gas oven we were using seemed only to have two heat settings, on and off. The first cake I made was so hard I actually took it outside and snapped it over my leg into little rock sized pieces all over the grass!
Attempts 3 and 4 were much more successful and we managed to make a pretty decent cake after about 4 hours in the kitchen. The only downfall was that it was so hot outside the icing ran everywhere and the ‘Happy Birthday’ that Ashley had piped on top was illegible by the time we actually got to Mary’s house. It tasted good though! 

We decided that we couldn’t face another night cooking for ourselves, so we walked to the club for dinner. The country club is a really nice place, but compared to the westernised prices we’re familiar with it is still dirt cheap! You can get a steak dish for £4, and I’m pretty sure the most expensive meal on the menu was no more than £6. It was a good night, however at about 9:40 we were rudely told by the bar man “let’s go now”, because they apparently close at 9 (oops), but no one told us! It was pretty hilarious though, and we couldn’t believe that those were the words that actually came out of his mouth... He obviously had only basic English, but even so, “let’s go now”... c’mon man, throw us a ‘please’ in there.

Time is going so fast, I can’t believe we’re 7 weeks in already!

Loving life in Swaziland 2K12 ;)

Kate xx

Looking Like a Tourist

So this week has been a bit hectic. Started off on Monday with me being in charge of 60 squealing kids at Injabulo; Ashley and Nelsiwe had to make a trip to MATATA (an out of town shopping area, there’s not much there though) to sort out graduation payments so that left me behind in charge! To make matters worse, not only can I not speak very much SiSwati, but the floors had been polished over the weekend. Here in Swaziland the Swazi women take a lot of pride in their homesteads being clean and tidy, one of the things they do is polish their floors... their concrete floors. This is a recipe for disaster in a preschool! Even after dropping like flies time after time, these kids do not understand that running on these floors in their socks IS going to hurt them, I can’t even count on my hands how many times I’ve seen a little head bounce off the floor, shortly followed by the biggest scream and longest crying session. They’ll never learn.

We’ve also taken on tennis coaching for UPS (Ubombo Primary School) for a few weeks, so now every Monday and Tuesday we walk to the Country Club and make a group of unwilling 12 year olds run around on a tennis court. Ashley is hilariously strict on them, and gives them push-up forfeits all the time – they looked a bit shocked after their first session with us, I don’t think they’re normally made to work that hard. This now makes Tuesdays a really busy day for us with Moriah Centre in the morning, the club for soup kitchen afterwards, back to hostel to cook the soup, back to the club for tennis coaching, back to hostel to finish cooking the soup and then finally off to soup kitchen! We’re on the go from 6:30am until 6:00pm when we finally sit down for dinner, no time for being lazy here.

Another lesson that we’ve learned this week is that Swazi stall owners will try to squeeze you for as much as possible, if you’re white of course. Ayanda (an ex-Sisekelo student) came with us to Injabulo to help out on Wednesday and afterwards we swung by MATATA to buy a few things. Ashley went back to one stall to buy a replacement bracelet... The first time she bought it she’d payed E10 (70p), but this time being with Ayanda when the stall owner asked for the money it was only E3! We must have looked like proper tourists that first time, so from now on I’m going to make sure I find out the real cost of things so we can’t be cheated again ;)

The Matrics (A-Level students, and pronounced ‘Metrics’) had their leaving dinner at hostel, this was a formal affair so obviously Ashley and I had not much appropriate to wear. Feeling under dressed next to the Matrics in their prom dresses and sky high heels I couldn’t help but wonder what these girls pull out of the bag for their prom! Some of the dresses were way more extravagant than anything I wore to my prom and this was only dinner at hostel, and I doubt that any of these girls will recycle an outfit.


Another ‘Only in Africa’ experience happened on Saturday; we were crossing the bridge from having a parent’s meeting at Injabulo and pretty much all of the local community were down at the river doing their weekly wash. This doesn’t sound strange, apart from the fact everyone was completely naked. Obviously because they don’t have that many clothes, when they wash them they don’t have anything else to put on; safe to say that Ashley and I were driving along not too sure of where to look!

Saturday night was one of the best nights we’ve had so far since being in Swaziland! We went for what we thought was an uneventful stroll to the shop, but actually ended up with us being stuck in deep mud, in the pitch black in the middle of the local nature reserve! Nick (a teacher at Sisekelo and a reverend) offered to give us all a lift back from the shop to hostel, but we ended up on a little bit of a detour. Ashley and I were having the time of our lives riding on the open back of Nick’s bucky (truck) and the wind was crazy in our hair, we soon realised that we’d gone past the turning for hostel and that Nick was heading towards the nature reserve. A nice little twist to the night! What we didn’t realise was that Nick’s bucky was only 2 wheel drive, plus it had been raining and he was planning to take us on the track 2m away from the dam. So it was inevitable that we were going to get stuck. All 5 of us (there were two other people from hostel as well) tried for about an hour to push this truck out of the mud; only to realise that it wasn’t going anywhere and we would have to call someone to tow us out. Thankfully one of the teachers came along in their 4 wheel drive and dragged us out of Nick’s mess, it was close though, because one of the ropes we used to secure the truck snapped after the first try, so we were down to just the one! But now I can say that I’ve survived being stranded in the wilderness of Africa, with wild animals around any corner ;) Well, sort of.

We also had a meeting at the Royal Crawl in Mndobandoba on Sunday with the community leader, Injabulo still isn’t receiving any food for lunch times, and Ashley and I are trying 24/7 to find some way to feed these children. We didn’t attend the main meeting at the Royal Crawl because it was in SiSwati, but the community leader came over for a talk and we have him our letters to try and sort something out. It was really interesting being at the Royal Crawl because we were able to see more of the Swazi’s culture and how they do things. Everyone sat on the floor at the meeting, and if you sit on a chair then you have to give the Chief a cow! Nelsiwe told us that once you’re at a meeting you aren’t allowed to leave before it is finished – if you do it is a great offence to the community.

I’m exhausted after this week! The weekend was hardly a weekend, but at least we’re being productive. I really hope that we can make headway with Injabulo some time soon.

Kate xx

Simunye Fair

Ashley and I have finally left Big Bend on an evening! Last night was Simunye Fair, an outdoor festival where there are traditional stalls during the day and DJ’s and African music on the night; obviously we went for the nightlife.
Still waiting for our kombi at 8:00pm in Big Bend I felt like we were never going to get there. How wrong I was. I heard our kombi before I saw it; over the speed bump it flies with green LCD lights plastered along the front and strobe lights rotating around the insides, lighting the whole thing up like the outside of a council house at Christmas. African house music was playing so loud it was making the kombi bounce up and down on its suspension like some car in a Snoop Dogg music video; all finished off with a sticker right on the front that says “School Bus”. This was going to be a good night.

We pulled into ‘Fresh’ before leaving Big Bend to buy some drinks for the journey; so £1.50 down and a couple of bottles of Smirnoff in my hands we climbed back onto what can only be described as our ‘pimped out’ kombi and settled in for the rough 1 ½ hour ride on Swazi ‘roads’ peppered with pot holes the size of kiddies swimming pools. (Honestly, no one here drives on their side of the road. Lines mean nothing and you basically drive wherever the hell you want or wherever there is the least amount of holes, dead animals or local people stood in the road trying to get into your car for a lift... which is usually into the path of an oncoming monster of a sugar cane truck). 

Eventually we roll up to Simunye Fair and jump out of the kombi; it drives off to park in the massive car park FULL of kombis that all look exactly the same - that was an enjoyable hour at 4am trying to find it again -_- Not helped by the fact that when people get tired they go and sleep in random kombis, so when we finally thought we had found it we carried on looking because there were 5 people sleeping inside that we knew we definitely didn't come with!

Simunye Fair is awesome. Anything alcoholic was only £1, so we knew straight away that we were in for a great time! ;) There was also live music, not that we were familiar with it but it was a new experience! In Swaziland everyone seems to be really into what they call 'house music'; it's not at all like the house music we get back in England, it is VERY African and has a lot of African drums as the bass but they than have lots of DJ's with names like 'DJ Toxik' and 'DJ Crystal' so you can imagine the sort of thing that we were listening to!
Have a flick through some of this if you're are all interested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X0GNX-FiM4

Being at Simunye Fair was very similar to being at a music festival back home, apart from the boys here tell me that I am a good dancer (which is not true, but all they seem do is stamp a lot, so maybe I am alright at 'African dancing'), and they don't seem to understand you when you say you don't want to dance with them/get with them/marry them! I've pulled the 'I don't have a phone' excuse hundreds of times, told them I have a boyfriend (but unless he's Swazi or you're married you're basically single and up for grabs). I even tried to put this one guy off by saying I was only 16 to which he said "oooh too young then!" but still persisted anyway. These Swazi's really are triers I'm telling you. It's pretty funny though, some of the lines they come out with, wow, only in Africa!
So I did a bit of stomping, and a lot of shouting in broken English and it was time to leave. Finding the kombi was an absolute nightmare as the driver gave us his phone number but had his phone off, well done. So at 6am in the morning we arrived back in Big Bend and walked back to hostel. The sun was already out and it was warm, if it was a weekday we would be waking up in 30minutes! However breakfast on weekends is at 8am and that was definately too early, we both slept in until lunch time and I felt like my old lazy English self again! 

It was an enjoyable night, and I can't wait for House on Fire! (Another music event.)

Kate xx

Saturday Adult Simunye Country Club Fair

Africa Unite

Tuesday morning this week I was hating life. At 1.00am we had a fire drill in hostel. Even though I knew that it was coming someday soon, I was still hoping and wishing that it would never happen. Since being here both me and Ashley have built up some kind of superhuman deafness to the bell in hostel, this is fantastic because we can quite happily snore away as the 5am, 5:30am, 6:00am alarm bells scream (and I mean scream) through the hostel corridors. Not so good when that same alarm is the alarm to wake you up and save your life when you’re in danger of burning to death.

So at this ridiculous time I was sleeping away and only vaguely aware of a noise in my head, 10 minutes later and it’s still going and I realise what must be happening... So I put on some more clothes because we’ve heard teachers laughing about this one time a boy ran out fully naked, and I didn’t want to give them anything to talk about in my short jammies, haha ;) 10 minutes later after being informed that we’d all done a terrible job and were now (hypothetically) dead, I returned to my warm bed as happy as could be.

Tuesday did improve considerably after work though. We met up with some boys who had pulled up outside the Moriah Centre while we were working on a dirt bike. Obviously attracted to the idea of making new friends with expensive things to have fun with (which is a rarity in Big Bend, as there is basically nothing here to do) we ventured outside to them and Ashley managed to persuade them to wait for us after work so we could have a go on their bikes and quads!
We went down to the sand by the river at Game 5 and had some great fun on their quads, we were meant to be getting back to start cooking for soup kitchen, but you know... easily distracted!
Covered in sand, dirt and sweating under the African sun with no sun cream on I knew it was only a matter of time before my ginger gene kicked in and I developed an instant case of skin cancer. (Honestly, I’ve burned here even when the days have been cloudy and there have been no shadows on the ground. Thanks DNA.)
The boys decided they were too hot and were going for a swim in the river. Now, here’s the thing about water in Swaziland; unless it is coming out of a tap it has probably (more likely definitely) got crocodiles living in it. But because these lads had grown up in Swaziland and were well informed on the whole crocodile situation we decided to trust them and began jumping off the bridge into the water below. Although the water was murky brown and warm it was great fun, the crocodile issue was on my mind but I took comfort in the fact that there were 3 boys there with us, each with considerably more fat on them than I had on myself, I went with the logic that we all leave the scrappy chips until last!
All of us being pretty much in our underwear we had attracted quite a lot of attention from the on looking locals, most of them watched us from a safe distance from the water, probably betting on us all in SiSwati who would get eaten first... silly white people.
Back at hostel we told the Aunties about our exciting day; Aunty Rose went absolutely ballistic at us and told us that if we were ever to go in the river swimming again she would beat us with a big stick; because if we died then she would cry, and she doesn’t want to cry. I love Aunty Rose but I don’t doubt for one second that she would beat me with a big stick if I went in that river again!

On Thursday at Moriah we were told that after we had been swimming in the river on Tuesday a large crocodile had been spotted just where we were jumping off the bridge (news travels fast in Big Bend). Apparently the noise attracts them, and this story prompted more of the teachers at Moriah Centre to tell us stories of dead children and one legged children. I think the moral of the story was to stay out of the river, and stay the f**k away from the crocodiles!

On the plus side, Injabulo is getting slightly better as the weeks go by. We already have so many great memories from the preschool and we never have an uneventful day there! After we had handed out peanut butter sandwiches on Friday one child decided that he was going to throw up all over the front steps at the school. As Nelsiwe was not yet here and my SiSwati is still only on the level of “hamba en toi” – go to the toilet, and “tulani” – be quiet I had no idea how to ask this child what was wrong. I took the high fever, shaking, ragged breathing and throwing up instantly as malaria or something deadly and began to freak out in a professional ‘teacher’ manner. All I could do was lay him down at the back of the classroom, give him water and put a cold compress on his head. He didn’t die right then and there which was a relief, and was back the school the next day after we had dropped him home. I think it was just the flu. But all the diseases and infections in a place like this just play on your mind and I was terrified for this kid! Overreaction of the sniffles I think.  
Ashley also made this tiny toddler cry like nothing I’ve ever seen before! She tried to hand them a peanut butter sandwich only to have them immediately scream in her face and burst into tears for about 10 minutes! Nelsiwe said it was because they’d never seen a white person bend down really close to them before, haha! So Ashley gave the sandwich to the kids friend who wasn’t crying, score for them.

Kate xx 

When the Polokwane Girls Came to Stay

This week we've had the pleasure of the 4 Polokwane volunteers coming to stay with us and help us out on our projects! Nicola, Daisy, Amelia and Kim have been our first Project Trust visitors and they were absolutely lovely to have around, can't wait to see them again at Christmas!

On Friday we took them up to Injabulo with us; and on the way when we were crossing the river bridge we came across a man with a massive gun. Fair to say we were shitting ourselves slightly until we explained that he was there for safety reasons, there was a HUGE crocodile sunning itself in the shallows of the river - the first one we have seen!
Soup Kitchen on the evening was also a success, the kids absolutely adored the girls and we're running around with all 6 of our cameras taking pictures of anything and everything. Ashley also taught Aunty Vina how to dance to the Waka Waka song!

The girls at Soup Kitchen!

Over the weekend we organised to go over to Mantenga Cultural Village in Ezulwini to give the girls a bit of an insight into the Swazi culture! So at 9am on Saturday morning all 6 of us crammed ourselves (Swazi style) into the girls' hire car, plugged in the iPod to the AUX cable and set off for the beautiful Ezulwini Valley. With Nicola's crazy driving we arrived at our backpackers in record time, however we did have a few bumps and bruises from flying over speed bumps at 120km/h, but we were alive. 

Due to the help of a borrowed Sat-Nav we found ‘Legends Backpackers’, the insanely cheap place where we were staying! For the price of E120 per night (£8 per night!) I wasn’t expecting much... Therefore I was surprised to find that we had a dorm room all to ourselves, there was free wifi, a decent bathroom and toilet, mosquito nets over the bunk beds and free tea and coffee in the morning! Can’t ask for much more than that, and if I’m honest with you, the free wifi pretty much made everyone’s day. I’d sleep in a shed if there was free wifi!
After finding the backpackers we set off on the short drive to the Cultural Village that was literally around the corner. Unfortunately for Nicola and the hire car the road couldn’t really be classed as a road, and she found herself dodging over bumps and driving down into what could only be described as gully’s the entire way to the Cultural Village. One pretty big bash to the bottom of the car made us all slightly concerned, but I’m pretty sure that the metal pipe I saw on the road out of the rear windscreen had already been there before we passed over ;)
Once at the Cultural Village we paid the E100 entry fee (£7.10) and found our way around... We were in time for the first Cultural Dance performance of the day, which meant that we had an interesting 45 minutes worth of watching muscly Swazi men dance around wearing nothing but sheepskin leg warmers and tiny stripy skirts. There was a lot of stomping around, a lot of drumming and a lot of shouting really loudly; there were also many many impressive high kicks above the head (men and women alike), kicks so high I’m pretty grateful for the Nike orange sports shorts that they were wearing under their mini skirts...  There was also this one guy who was making bird noises, at first I thought he had some sort of whistle in his mouth, but I soon realised that it was just him making the noise, I really want to learn! 

One of the dances was a high paced threatening dance (I’m not overly sure when you would dance in a threatening way, but you know...) which involved the group of men in short skirts stomping away while another guy walked up and down the line shouting insanely fast in SiSwati; the best way for me to describe how he sounded would be for you to imagine someone with tourettes attemping to rap to Eminem at twice the normal rapping pace, in SiSwati. It really was something I can tell you that for sure!
At the end of the performance the dancers came into the crowd to separate a Chinese couple from their fancy cameras and tripods and involve slightly hesitant tourists with the dancing and singing! The slightly angry tourettes guy from before took my hand in his seriously sweaty one and pulled me out of the shade into the sunshine, thrust a Swazi spear into my hands and shouted out the steps for me to join in with. Luckily the dancing was only stamping your feet; 4 with the right, 2 with the left, 1 with the right, 1 with the left and repeat; this was a bonus for me because my dancing skills back in England are pretty below average, but here all you do is stomp! It’s brilliant. Safe to say I had the dance pretty much cracked after the first 2 rounds of the sequence, however the tourettes guy must’ve thought I looked pretty confused by the whole thing because he continued to shout out loud at me “4 on right! 2 on left! 1 right, 1 left! 4 on righ-----”, I felt bad telling him I was a pro at his cultural dance already, so I continued to stomp, bob my head and smile at him with an attentive look on my face... I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy myself, but I really did! He was a lovely guy and when we’d finished dancing I returned his spear, gave him the Swazi handshake, received a really sweaty hug and said “siyabonga” (thank you) only to be laughed at when I walked back to my seat. These Swazi’s find us trying to speak SiSwati absolutely hilarious, it’s not even the wrong word! Must by my pronunciation, I’ll get there eventually, and if I don’t, I’ll be a source of entertainment for many a Swazi person.  

Having a bash at the Cultural Dancing :D

After the Cultural Dance a man called Paul led us around the cultural village and explained the Swazi traditions and beliefs to us. Now, Paul was his Christian name, not his birth name – I can’t remember his birth name but there was a lovely story behind it... One day his father had been travelling home from hunting out in the mountains and a storm struck, in order to get home quickly he had to swim across a dangerous river (as a short cut). Then he arrived home to find that his wife had given birth to a baby boy, so he named the baby after the name of the river he had successfully crossed. The Swazi people have such lovely reasons for choosing names for their children!

Paul

Traditional Homesteads 

Here’s a few things that I learned about old Swazi Culture:

·         When a child reaches the age of 6 they move out of their parents hut and move into another with unmarried people of the same sex who are also over 6 years of age.

·         The girls hut is placed at the very front of the village, that way when intruders come and storm the first hut in the village they find it full of unmarried girls. This creates a distraction for them and while they are busy telling all the girls that they love them and asking them for their hand in marriage (having forgotten their original reason of being there, i.e. killing the boys and men and taking all of the women) the youngest girl runs to the men and informs them of the intruders so that they can come prepared to defend the village!

·         Women and children under 6 sleep on the left hand side of the hut and men sleep on the right hand side of the hut, this separation is kept even when someone is man and wife, however if the man feels ‘in the mood’ and the children are all asleep he will bang on the wooden supports inside the hut and call the wife over to his side!

·         If a man’s brother dies he is entitled to his wife, and can take her as another wife of his own. If he doesn’t wish for another wife then he sends her back to her family.

·         When a girl gets married the father of the intended husband has to pay the father of the girl with cattle, normally around 15 cattle are given for a girl’s hand in marriage. However if the girl isn’t a virgin the price is open for discussion.

·         If a man has committed a crime such as adultery or worse he is taken to the execution rock; he must stand at the edge of the rock and throw himself off the edge to fall to an ungraceful death. If he is feeling slightly nervous of the edge all he has to do is turn around to face the unhappy village entourage pointing their sharp spears encouragingly at him – he then turns around again to jump.

·         A woman may not cook the heart or brain of an animal; she may also not eat the brain of an animal. It is believed that if she tastes the brain she will then become more intelligent than her man, and they can’t be having that ;)

There are many more facts but I can’t remember them all! This should give you an idea of the old Swazi culture and traditions though.

We then had a rough walk through the woods to Mantenga waterfall, it is an absolutely beautiful place and even though we hadn’t brought our swim-wear we decided that it was too good an experience to pass up! So we stripped to our underwear and jumped in for a swim. It was gorgeous. I managed to get my toe stuck in a rock though and pretty sure I broke it when I pushed off to swim again, ouch. It wasn’t until after our swim that we thought about crocodiles and snakes etc! Luckily none of us were eaten and we spoke to a park ranger who informed us that there were no dangerous animals in the falls, so that was lucky. 

We waited about an hour and a half for our lunch in the restaurant (the Polokwane girls first experience of slow Swazi service!) and witnessed some monkeys run inside, steal some straws and run off again looking pretty guilty.

On the evening we decided to go coning at KFC! For those of you who don’t know coning, please, allow me to introduce you... You order a cone with no flake at a drive-thru, when the ice-cream is handed to the driver at the last window they put their hand straight into the ice-cream part and grip the cone by the top (not the bottom), look the confused staff member in the face, say thank you and drive off. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A SWAZI MAN LOOK SO SHOCKED IN MY WHOLE LIFE. Hahahahaaa we were absolutely howling and Nicola was covered in ice-cream, it was fantastic though and we got it on camera! Back at the backpackers we went for a pizza and some drinks, it was a really chill night just getting to know the girls better.

Legends Backpackers with some cheeky drinks!

The Sunday was equally as good, at the Ezulwini shopping area after a delicious cooked breakfast for only £1.50 some guy approached us and started chatting. Turns out he was one of the Prince’s of Swaziland’s ‘bitches’ to put it correctly. He came grovelling over to us asking for numbers and everything, to then introduce us to the Prince and inform us that the Prince was going home for a bath before he wanted to take us all out later. Que the usual story of not having mobile phone numbers! We got given the Prince’s number though and were told to phone him later ‘if we didn’t then we would disappoint him’, so later on when we were relaxing by the hot springs, more commonly known as The Cuddle Puddle we rang the Prince. Didn’t pick up though, surprise surprise ;) 

The Cuddle Puddle is also very aptly named, we attracted quite a lot of attention from the boys of all ages there and I’m definitely going to make up a boyfriend for the future! I’ve never had to give a valid reason and explain why I am single before, they just can’t take no for an answer here! :P

The girls were intending to leave on Monday afternoon, but Kathy managed to persuade them to stay for dinner (achieved by terrifying them about driving in South Africa in the dark!) and we took them to the nature reserve in the truck that evening. We saw a giraffe about 5 meters away! It was stood in the middle of the road just staring at us in the truck! I honestly haven’t given giraffes enough credit on the animal front, you really don’t appreciate them until you see they in the flesh and in the wild – I’m gradually becoming fonder of them, they really are lovely.

On the whole it was an amazing weekend and it was fantastic to have a break from Big Bend, Ezulwini is such a gorgeous place and we will definitely be returning. We’re slowly but surely seeing more and more of this exciting country and pretty soon we will be able to say that we’re familiar with the whole of Swaziland!

Kate xxx