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

THE AMERICANS ARE BACK.

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

WANT IT

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

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

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

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

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

Moḉambique!

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

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

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

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

Eiffel's famous style!

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

'Atta'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate xx

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

Where there’s South Africans, there’s always a braii.

Firstly I would like to apologise, my last blog was incomplete. It was such a long one I forgot to include a weekends worth of information! Ashley and I headed to Build It Hardware Store with the 89 on Saturday 9^th armed with big ideas and Injabulo money. We had decided that we were going to paint the outside of the preschool building to get rid of the years and years worth of orange and brown dirt. The equivalent of £14 poorer we left Build It with a huge tub of cream paint and headed for Injabulo. We were rather ingenious exterior decorators and used flattened cereal boxes as painting palettes, 3 hours later we had finished the front of the school and were contemplating how we were going to tackle the high sides and back walls... Luckily at this point half of the male Mndobandoba population turned up on our doorstep wanting to help. So 12 Swazi men equipped with two brushes, a long broom handle and one roller did three-quarters of our workload for us! With all the free time on our hands we utilised our creativity and designed a stained glass window in our store room to prevent any peeking eyes from seeing our resources. 

 A job half well done (they really rushed the painting so everything is a little bit patchy, but this is Africa so oh well, YOLO) we rewarded our workers with E70 (£5) to split between them all and E6 (40p) for cigarettes for the 6 smokers in the group. Fair deal if you ask me. We also gave them some litchi’s and Pepsi as refreshments, we are top employers.

Genius.

Part of our crew ;)

So this week we started doing some coaching for Ubombo Primary School in the afternoons; well, this was my first time doing so, but Ashley has done a few sessions before. I was helping out with the swimmers, or rather the ‘non-swimmers’ to be precise. I’ve never coached swimming before and had no idea what I was doing, but I wasn’t worried because there was another teacher helping out with the non-swimmers too... until I found out they had never coached it either, they were just winging it this one time.

Quite a few events transpired within that one hour at the swimming pool so I will summarise it for you with a helpful hint; if I child tells you that they can swim without a sponge board, don’t believe them until you have seen them use it first. Two kids told me they could swim, and I realised when they were in the middle of the pool, splashing frantically and breathing heavily that, in fact, they could not swim without a sponge board despite their own beliefs. First day on the job and I nearly drown two primary schoolers, I’m sure I’ll get better. 

As we all know, this week has been all about luuurrrve, February 14^th brings Valentine’s Day. An excuse for greetings card companies to make a whole load of money, an increase in the world sales of teddy bears and chocolates in heart shaped boxes, and a pruning massacre of red roses.
We utilised the day by teaching our preschoolers the heart shape and made some heart crafts!

On the evening hostel was hosting their annual Valentine’s dinner, queue fancy dresses, standard hostel food, loud music and LOTS of screaming. Honestly, these kids are unbelievable; some of the dresses they were wearing were on the level of prom dresses, which if you ask me is completely unnecessary. There was one guy in a head to toe silver suit, wearing shades, with two dates to the dinner and a silver pimp cane to top the whole charade off.  This is what we live with. Honestly, there are a few who are too spoilt for their own good but on the whole they are decent kids, they’re great banter and to be honest some of the ‘over-the-top’ things they do are just hilarious.

February 14^th was also meant to bring us something special for our Valentine’s Day... namely our desk officer and the one and only director of Project Trust, INGRID!
To cut a very long story short we didn’t actually see Ingrid until the next morning; she was travelling with Dave (the new South Africa Desk Officer) and Jen (the new Senior Desk Officer). From their friendly squabbling I have gathered that Dave was navigating the car from J’burg, he fell asleep, they missed the turning to get to the border gate and after realising the mistake it wasn’t worth it to turn back. So they carried on to the north border, arriving at 6:10pm they were 10 minutes too late and weren’t going to be let through. So they jumped back into the car and made a quick dash through the dark, dodging cattle to the border gate on the east side of Swaziland... arriving at 7:57pm they had scraped through with only 3 minutes to closing time. Hence they arrived in Big Bend at 11:30 and it was too late to do anything but use Dave as a scapegoat for the mess up and go to sleep. 

Having Ingrid, Jen and Dave here was lovely, we showed them all of our projects and I was proud of what we have achieved here so far that I just wanted to tell them every tiny thing that we have done! The kids at Injabulo absolutely loved them and wanted hugs all the time, they also particularly enjoyed stroking Dave’s arm hair, they really are easily entertained. Unfortunately on their visit one of our girls decided it was the right time to projectile vomit all over the steps to the preschool, she managed to splash herself and Ashley and cover another girls bag in vomit, which lead to about 15 minutes of crying about the smelly bag. Well, we never have an uneventful day at Injabulo.
Ingrid treats us to lunch at Cafe 1985, and hands me a little package from my Mum, SCORE! I get a nice top to replace one of my favourites that was in the package that has still never arrived, a letter and some Percy Pigs. Life is Complete. M&S sweets, I didn’t realise until now that I missed you.
We also both get some treats off Ingrid, including some decent cheese (OMG, thanks for giving Ingrid the heads up on that one Mum!), Creme Eggs, Mini Eggs, Cadbury’s Chocolates and a British magazine. Getting visits is the best.

That evening they all come to hostel and help us cook for soup kitchen; strange to see them all sweating it out in the kitchen and Ashley and I think that it’s surprising cool for a change. Never thought I would see the day when something not over 32 degrees was ‘cool’. We pack everything into Ingrid’s hire car and set off along the terribly surfaced Siteki road to soup kitchen, luckily we have a really good haul of food and Ashley bought some sweets to hand out to the kids as well. When we pull up in the car soup kitchen is barely recognisable! Normally there are children running around, basically playing chicken in front of the truck and you have to be careful not to run over odd shoes, dogs and chickens. But not today. We pull up in the car and they are already stood in a neat group, containers on the table, and they start singing even before the engine is turned off! Aunty Vinah’s really made an effort to impress!
After everyone lends a helping hand to fill the swaying mountains of empty containers we play football, sing the hokey cokey and the girls do some cultural dancing – it’s a great thing to see, they all have so much fun performing for everyone and there’s one girl who loves the attention! She is a fantastic dancer though, so no one minds that she’s always up there.

We then drive straight from soup kitchen to Manzini to have dinner with Kathy and Richard, the banter in the car is brilliant and I couldn’t help feeling surprised at how relaxed and informal this visit seems to be. I thought it would be like selection and training all over again, feeling like you’re being watched and judged on everything but it really isn’t. Ingrid is just enjoying watching us do our thing and she’s having a fun time with the kids – not at all what I expected, but it is much better!
We were dubbed as the navigators and left responsible for getting the car to the restaurant where we would be meeting Kathy and Richard, can’t say we are all that familiar with getting around Manzini but we were the two in the car with the best knowledge on the subject, no matter how basic it may be. So after making a sneaky shortcut through a petrol station to overtake the slowest cane truck in the history of the world we went around a roundabout twice before realising there was only one exit, we finally arrived at the same Portuguese place that we had eaten dinner at about 2 weeks previous. Turns out that we have more social visits with Kathy and Richard when they live over an hour’s drive away rather than a 2 minute walk away!
After having a slightly questionable chicken carbonara and getting a case of the cheese sweats, I finished off the meal with an amazing slice of passion fruit cheesecake and high hopes about the future of our projects after the discussions that had taken place during the course of the meal.

The next morning we walked to Lebombo Villa for our one on one talks with Ingrid; Ashley goes first and Dave and I fill in the time with chatting, watching videos he took on his PT visit to China and playing pool. One of the videos I watched he described to me like this “so the Scottish volunteers taught the students how to Scottish dance, after performing a really regimented Scottish dance they said, ‘okay guys, now do your one!’, and all the Chinese students broke out into Gangnam Style.” I can tell you right now, that video did not disappoint.
After talking up my pool skills we decided to hit the table for a few games, and I have never played worse in my life. Extraneous factors such as the broken pool que, the sticky pool que, the absence of chalk, and the squint table all played against me rather than in my favour. Dave was laughing the whole way because he had been truthful about his pool skills (or rather the lack of them), and he was beating me. I have learned that you should never talk up your skill at something, rather keep it on the quiet side and allow your talents to shock and surprise people when everything is going in your favour... Otherwise you look like a right tw*t when you lose spectacularly.
Definitely keep things on the quiet side when you’re a girl and the game is pool; if you do badly it’s only expected, but if you do well then you’re in for some serious respect!  
For the record, I am good at pool. Just not on that table.

Sunday brought culinary delights to the lives of Ashley and I! We went to a braii (BBQ) in Nsoko with all of the people that are in our congregation at church. We were all saying goodbye to an amazing American family who have been working out here for 2 years as missionaries. They’ve been running different care points around the poor rural areas of Nsoko; and on top of that they’re in the process of adopting the most adorable little girl who was abandoned at the hospital by her young mother because she has cerebral palsy.
They really are brilliant people and they’ve done so much to help the people that they’re involved with, they will be sorely missed by many and we hope to see them again when they come back to Swaziland to collect Mumu (the little girl) when the adoption paperwork is finalised!

The braii was fantastic and there were about 5 different puddings, so I was having the time of my LIFE.

Mumu :)

Claire; daughter of the missionaries, photographer and only 14! Although, I am pretty sure she is still lying to me about her age... she's more like 16. 

Life is good; I hope yours is too...

Kate xx

One Month Back in Swaziland!

My blogging style is normally one blog per week; but since getting back we have been caught in a whirlwind of stress, long hours, inconvenient journeys, ridiculous heat and so so so so so many children. There are children literally coming out of my ears.
I do sincerely apologise to anyone who has been biting their nails down to the quick in angst, just wondering where all my interesting posts are. (I doubt there are many of you). As you will soon see I have barely had enough time to shower and eat this past month, and the near future doesn’t look like it will be bringing us any relief!  

Our first week back was very uneventful; it basically included sleeping, washing all our clothes (and my towel, it smelt DISGUSTING), trying to keep cool (and failing) and taking lots of showers to try and rid ourselves of the constant sweat. Well, the constant sweat was me; Ashley seems immune to the heat whereas I am the equivalent of a snowman lost in the desert.
We spent one creepy night completely alone in the darkness of hostel due to an insane storm causing a power cut; we didn’t get to eat anything as we couldn’t cook, and Ashley walked around with a head torch on. She loved it.
The new student’s orientation was that weekend, which we had been told we had to be back for. Turns out we didn’t have to do anything at all, and we had lost a week’s travelling. However we did probably save an awful lot of money being stuck back in hostel and not gallivanting around South Africa for another 7 days. The prefects decided to wake the ‘newbie’s’ up at 2:00am with vuvuzelas which sent me straight back to the early morning horrors of Leadership Camp, at least this time I could stay snuggled up in bed! Suckers.

Contact from the UK! Specifically Scotland.
On arriving back to Swaziland it was like the Highlands had come for a visit; one of last year’s volunteers Hannah Craig sent us out a parcel for Christmas, so we had cards to hand out to everyone and also some shortbread – which I was particularly happy about! Ashley’s Aunty also sent out 3 tins of haggis for everyone to try, so Ashley cooked up a nice little meal and we tucked into the surprisingly delicious substance that is haggis.
Big thank you to the Scots out there! Your culture and culinary delicacies were much appreciated.

Injabulo Preschool
We’ve also discovered the brilliant coming home surprise in the form of food donations at Injabulo! The first 4 months that we were here we hadn’t been receiving food donations of any sort; and normally the preschool received a donation every month so we could feed the children at lunch time.
So for 4 months we had been angrily ringing around all of the local people with the power, trying to source where our food was... Then out of the blue we arrive at preschool to find our store room completely empty of our resources (panic, we thought we had been robbed), and full of food. We hadn’t been robbed by the way, only badly reorganised.
So now we can actually feed our children! Thank you WFP (World Food Programme).
FYI; Ashley and I have tried some of the food, its brown mush that tastes like burning cigarettes... I think the caregivers might need a new pot.

Nelsiwe buzzing for the food!

The food that tasted like smoke, yum.

Last year we thought we had a lot on our plate with 60 children... but after our Registration Day turned into “Registration Week - pop by whenever you like and we’ll probably let your kid in because you’re in a bad situation and we can’t turn you away/your kid is really cute” fiasco; we have now managed to land ourselves with 76 registered children. Flip-my-life. 

Luckily one of the parents who was registering a child wants to help out with teaching at Injabulo; the idea is she will volunteer for a while and not have to pay school fees, then she can receive a share of the money like Nelsiwe does. This makes our lives the tiniest bit easier because we have another body to help out... It also makes Nelsiwe’s life a whole lot easier on the days that she’s alone with all those crazy children!

This isn't even one full class...

Nelsiwe also said to Ashley and I that “when you are not here it’s like I am walking alone through a desert with no shelter, but when you are here it’s like there is a big biggg shelter over me and I know that everything is alright” – what a cutie.

Everything started out pretty peachy at Injabulo this year, yes there were a lot of children but they were kind of behaving themselves... Until this week.
Ashley and I arrived early to Injabulo to find the store room COMPLETELY ransacked, it looked like we had been robbed by a heard of blind elephants. We had a bit of a rant and a rave, complained about the state of the place and decided that we would have a meeting with Nelsiwe about the mess. Then we knuckled down and tidied it up, for an hour. Later on that morning when we were sorting out payment with Nelsiwe and Bongkile (the parent volunteer) we left to classroom to find the kids had gone into the store room; they pulled EVERYTHING out from where we had tidied it away to, strewn books all over the bloody village and decided that puzzles work better when the pieces are buried in dirt. It was worse than before.
As you can probably tell, we were not happy. At all. Ashley had a bit of a screaming fit and shouted at all the kids to go home, we screamed on about never going into the store room, respecting toys and not throwing books. I walked into the trashed store room, stood alone and took a breather; I was so furious I was about to punch a wall, and with there being so many children about the place one of them was bound to run in the way and would end up with a black eye or something... Plus Ingrid (our Desk Officer and Director of Project Trust!) is coming out to visit us in 4 days, so it would be rather bad on me if I looked like a child abuser, might just get repatriated for that. 

Moriah Centre

Moriah Centre has also increased in numbers this year! It’s about time too; the preschool has 7 teachers and there are only 4 classes, last year the largest class had 10 pupils in – when you compare those statistics to Injabulo you can really understand just how much we have to battle to complete the easiest things. So now there are 4 classes with 15 students in each, still easy as pie to manage and now more children can come to preschool!

Since coming back Ashley and I are the designated kombi drivers for Moriah Centre; we drive the kombi that has been donated by the American Missionaries, so that should mean we have lovely, calm stress-free mornings because we drive (rather than walk to) Moriah, right? Wrong.
It is currently summer in Swaziland, and also the rainy season. For the past month it has been chucking it down almost every night, and there’s been a fair few thunderstorms with tornado like winds, supreme lightning and annoying power shortages. Therefore all 3 dams in the country are flooded, and all the rivers are high, which means that no one can cross the bridge from the village ‘Game 5’ to our area of Big Bend. Every morning we have been leaving before 7am to walk 20 minutes to Ubombo Primary School (UPS) to collect the kombi, then we drive to Game 5 pack 5 teachers and about 30 kids into the kombi and drive them to preschool with our fingers crossed, hoping that the police doing traffic checks don’t look too closely into our windows.
We then drive them all back after preschool, and walk back from UPS in the blazing heat. Even the days we’re at Injabulo we’ve been doing the Game 5 run, so in between running Moriah people around we have been getting on 2 public kombis to Injabulo in the middle of nowhere, teaching, waiting (sometimes for 2 hours) for kombis back, taking everyone home, walking back from UPS and then cooking for soup kitchen. Hectic. ‘Working 9 ‘till 5’, I wish... try 7 ‘till 6.  And that’s not including paperwork.

Swaziland, please stop raining and let everyone walk across the bridge. Thank you.

However, we have had some pretty funny times since returning;

• We missed the very first day that all the kids came back because we were at Injabulo, but Mary (one of the teachers) told us that “yesterday was like a funeral, all the kids were crying like someone had died!”
• Cecelia one of the cooks decided that she was going to bash the curtains in the church hall while we were doing singing and dancing with the children... This unleashed a plague of horrible black insects that look like evil grasshoppers, they jump in all directions like tiny reflex balls on steroids and for some reason have appeared in our lives in their thousands since coming back. Summer must be their breeding season. :( The kids were running around and screaming while I was squashing anything that came near me; meanwhile Cecelia and Gugu were calmly using brooms to herd up the insects into enormous black writhing masses in the corners of the room before disposing of them with an industrial hoover. I am not exaggerating, there were literally thousands of them.
• Ashley finds a dead snake.
• Nonhlanhla and Khanyisile (two more teachers) beat down a tiny bird that was flying around the church hall with some flags... They were charging around like nutcases, wielding these flags for about 10 minutes, they nearly smashed through the windows and brought down the ceiling fans! They didn’t kill it as Ashley and I originally thought; only traumatised it enough so that it lay still while they were walking around with it pretending to eat it, and telling everyone not to free it because they were saving it for lunch. “No, not dead, just tired. It’s meat, for the fire, for BRAII! It’s nice.”“Where is it, I want my lunch. I want to eat it, want my lunch.” Ashley and I freed it, that’s where it went. To be honest, I think she was kidding about having it for a braii that day. But I don’t doubt that she probably has killed and eaten birds on other days.

Florence getting in on the action!

Nonhlanhla with her lunch.

Freeing the bird from its fate.

My re-enactment of how they were chasing the bird around - this is much tamer actually! But similar things went on for a good 5 minutes. 

 Soup Kitchen

You will all remember the money we raised before Christmas to buy shoes for the kids at soup kitchen, and to buy presents for our preschoolers... Anyway, we had a fair bit of that money left over, so we decided to buy every child at soup kitchen a lunchbox and water bottle – this way they all have a container to bring with them for the food, we don’t have to serve them 2nds into their bare hands and they can take clean water home with them! A pretty sound investment if you ask me.

New boxes!

 We also hand out loads of rejected clothes from girl’s hostel, they all leave stuff behind when they go home for the Christmas holidays and we ended up getting most of it! Amongst this large collection of clothes was a swimming costume, maybe a woman’s size 12... and Aunty Vina claimed it for herself. Now you have seen pictures of Aunty Vina and she is not a small lady. But she was incessant “For meee! For Durbaan!” So she’s going to be hitting the Durban beaches in a pretty tight black one-piece, you work it Vina!

For DURBAAAAAAN, hahahahahahaaa :D

We’ve seen Aunty Vina have quite a few freak outs in the last month; the first was over her maize crops.  A sponsor gave her maize seeds to plant in a field so she can grow it to feed the orphans who live with her; apparently a patch in the middle of the field has been stolen and she went mental at all the kids one time we were there! She thinks that either they stole the maize, or their families, or someone that they know... Thing is it could’ve been anyone, but they all got an earful, bless.
The second freak out was directed at one girl from soup kitchen; she accused Aunty Vina of keeping soup kitchen food to herself. One Friday we didn’t have transport so we couldn’t go to soup kitchen, therefore the kids were expecting twice as much food the next time, but there wasn’t because we had forgotten to defrost it. One of the older girls turned around to Aunty Vina and (I assume) accused her in front of everyone of keeping the food – which she didn’t do because we just hadn’t brought it. Safe to say Aunty Vina wasn’t best pleased at the accusations and she verbally tore a strip off this girl. I can’t say I’m not surprised, she comes under a lot of scrutiny from certain jealous people in the community, and if gossip starts (whether it be false or true) things could get difficult for her.

We have also been introduced to the Swazi drink ‘Buganu’ by Aunty Vina, which is a beer made from the marula fruit. Marula fruit trees are very common in Swaziland, and the marula season begins each year in mid Feburary – May. Everyone is Swaziland has a massive celebration of the marula fruit, and every year the Kings holds an annual Marula Festival where different families present the Royal family with some of their home brewed Buganu. Then everyone gets drunk as hell.
It’s a cloudy white substance and basically tastes like very strong beer, it’s about 8.7% and I can’t say I’m a massive fan. But it’s traditional and I can say I’ve tried it, so that’s good enough! Everyone who drinks it gets absolutely steaming, and apparently it brings out an uncontrollable urge to eat meat, and livestock thefts increase significantly during marula season... Interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tlF3kGbT4 - hit this link and you won't regret it!

Hostel

Aunty Rose has been an absolute STAR since we got back from South Africa, her banter has excelled over the Christmas holidays and she genuinely makes me wet myself at least 3 spectacular times in a week. You have no idea about this woman, really, check out my ‘Aunty Rose’ post as there are a few more gems on there!

THE STORY OF THE BLACK MAMBA – one day at hostel Ashley and I headed down to the staff room at school, only to find all of the teachers gathered outside the computer room. We had no idea what all the excitement was about so we decided to investigate. Turns out that the IT teacher had been sat working and not realised that there had been a black mamba snake coiled up on the computer table next to him! Mambas are deadly venomous and a black mamba bite would leave you dead within 2 minutes; don’t even try getting to a hospital, you might as well just lay down and think about all the lovely things that have happened in your life.
Anyway, we went inside the computer room to have a look at the snake because since being in Africa we haven’t come across one, even though they are all over! After feeling a bit tense in the room we left to allow the security guards to dispose of the mamba. They came in wielding a double barrelled shotgun and a large plank of wood. There was some discussion over whether they should turn off the electricity and shoot it (not a great plan as they would have destroyed some computers), or wait until it slithered into an open space and shoot it. Neither of these plans happened. In the end they took the plank of wood and beat it to death. It was quite exciting.

Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Kathy and Richard’s New House

After a hectic week on project we decided to get away for the weekend; we caught a public kombi to Manzini and were treated to a restaurant dinner by Kathy and Richard at a rather fancy Portuguese place. We were then taken to their new house, which is MASSIVE and overlooks the hills and countryside of Manzini. There are 3 large bedrooms for the two of them, a swimming pool, two verandas and you could have a game of five aside football in their lounge. 

The next day we moved onto our backpackers ‘Sondzelas’ which is inside Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, we walked down an unmarked dirt track for 5km in the blazing midday heat with no idea where we were going. Finally we arrived and headed down to main camp that night for a spot of Swazi Dancing! 

This track was ENDLESS. We walked right into the horizon of this photo I swear, and even further. 

Sunday morning we went for a walk in the sanctuary, we headed over to the lake and walked the ‘Hippo Trail’, unfortunately we didn’t see any hippos but we did see our first zebras! We also had our lunch kindly paid for by a group of people who were HASH-ing in the sanctuary. Allow me to explain... Rich people from Swaziland and Mozambique had met each other at the sanctuary to do what they enjoy the most, drinking and running. We were talking to 3 people from the HASH group for a few hours in the restaurant and they offered to pay for our food and drinks, score! We also caught a lift back to Manzini with one of them in return for helping out with a weekly food shop... great deal.

Oh hi Zebra.

Finished walking the Hippo Trail

Braving the animals, trooper.

It has been a stressful few weeks back, but now we’re starting to get back into the swing of things. Ingrid is coming out for a visit this coming week, so we’ll have some pressure on us! Nah, just kidding, we’ll cruise it, Swazi vols are the best vols after all. ;)

Kate xx