Trigger Happy

Okay, so this week on Monday we were at Moriah Centre and they received a massive delivery of free (going out of date) food, drinks and other items from Matata Spar (Spar is exactly the same here as it is in England, so no confusion there). This rather pee’d Ashley and I off because we’ve been asking for donations for soup kitchen and Injabulo from them for ages, and they give us nothing! Then when they do decide to donate, they donate to the one preschool that has loads of sponsorship already... priorities?

Back at hostel they’re having a small redevelopment, they’re spending some of the budget and building a second kitchen and doing some maintenance. This also included throwing out all the old shelves, sofas, pillows, mattresses and anything else that didn’t have a use anymore. With soup kitchen in mind we threw ourselves into the crazy frenzy of workers all scrabbling for mattresses and managed to bag ourselves one mattress and seven pillows to give to the orphans who sleep on the floor at Aunty Vinah’s place.

This weekend was Easter weekend; basically everyone in Swaziland is Christian and Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar... therefore once the schools had broken up on Thursday afternoon, hoards and hoards of people were out and about lugging massive bags with them and getting piled into huge lorries to be taken to church for a 3 day celebration of Jesus Christ. The whole of Swaziland must have been in those lorries, I swear it. Never have I seen so many people all rushing to get to the same place at the same time! Then again, I haven’t been on the London Underground at rush hour – but I’ll bet you that the Swazi bus stations on Easter weekend come pretty close!
At Injabulo on Thursday we only had 24 children in total! This was strange because it wasn’t raining or overcast, and usually the reason for kids not coming to school is that it’s raining or it looks like it is going to rain. Turns out that the primary school down the road broke up for Easter on Wednesday, so the parents assumed we had closed too. No. We’d planned a whole Easter day! Bought and boiled 80 eggs for an Easter egg hunt, dragged felt tips with us to colour in the eggs and printed off and cut out 80 rabbit masks and rabbit ears... and basically no one turned up. It was strange having such a small amount of kids and 4 teachers; it was like we were at Moriah Centre! Small classes, manageable activities and everyone had a chair and a table.

Luckily the leftover 56 boiled eggs didn’t go to waste; we had finally collected up all the tins of food that we had asked the Sisekelo students to donate for soup kitchen and Mrs Dlamini the Head of Catering at hostel had donated us 10kg of rice to cook. Therefore we actually cooked REAL food for soup kitchen for once; rice with a sauce made from gravy, baked beans and pilchards (it sounds dubious I know, but they loved it) grated boiled egg, bread and a jam sandwich for pudding! It was so lovely to see the kids properly enjoying their food, and not just eating it because they have to if they want to eat that night.

Someone enjoyed themselves!

Round of applause ;)

Easter weekend Ashley and I escaped from Big Bend and headed off to Shewula Mountain Camp; we set off by public kombi to Siteki, swapped kombi to Simunye and then fought our way onto a kombi destined for Shewula at the Simunye bus station. There must have been about 25-30 people with large bags trying to fight their way onto this tiny rickety kombi; the doors opened and people were pushing, shoving and throwing their belongings into the kombi, they were standing on old ladies and children in their efforts to grab I seat, even babies were going flying, I’m sure of it. Somehow we managed to find a seat and both squished into it with our bags, sleeping bags, pillows and tent (how we fit I do not know) and we started the slow and bumpy one hour journey to the rural community of Shewula. The kombi broke down twice on the way, and I honestly thought we were going to be left stranded in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully the kombi driver tweaked the engine a few times, and miraculously this beat up old piece of junk restarted.
Unfortunately for Ashley and I we were misinformed on where we should get off the kombi by the driver and we ended up at the 5km sign post for the Shewula Mountain Camp in the midday heat. Brilliant. So we began our long and unsure trek along the rural dirt road asking everyone we passed if they knew where the Mountain Camp was... “oohhh I know it”, “how far is it?” “it’s faaaar faaaaar that way, go over the hill, faaar.” So we walked and we walked, we walked for an hour uphill and finally we saw another Shewula Mountain Camp sign telling us that we were 2km away. I don’t trust road signs in Swaziland, the distance on them is more like the distance to the next sign rather than the distance from your destination!

We eventually arrive at the Mountain Camp and we’re the only people staying there that night; we pitch up the tent and the views are beautiful. We can see into three different valleys, and on a clear day you can see right over to Maputo in Mozambique.

 The Camp is a really lovely place and the best thing about it is that it’s a community project; all the money that is gained from the Camp goes towards running the camp (obviously) and any profit from that is used in the community. The camp has been established since 1999 and in the last 14 years they have provided three schools in the community with full kitchens, and other smaller projects such as building a small house for an old Gogo (Grandmother) with no home.
We go with one of the guys who works at the camp for a guided walking tour, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before but we do learn some new facts. He walks us through long grass, fields and through barbed wire fences; I don’t think we used a proper path at all! We saw where the community get their water, saw the forest in which they only bury the late Chiefs and we picked and ate fresh guava. I also learned that when you go into someone’s homestead as a mark of respect you remove your hat (or anything from your head), unless you are a married Swazi woman who wear scarves around their hair to show that they are married. Another fact I didn’t know is that when a homestead has made Swazi Beer they prop up a long stick with a white flag/plastic bag on the end to indicate to the community that they are selling Swazi Beer, alternatively if they are selling meat they raise a red flag/bag. So from the side of the hill you can look out across the homesteads and see who is selling beer and meat!

Shewula Homesteads

As there’s no electricity at the Mountain Camp we didn’t have much to do once night fell, so we played cards in the kitchen where there was one electric bulb and then went to sleep in the tent hoping that we didn’t die due to the tent being half collapsed and the zip being broken on the door so we couldn’t actually close it. I was terrified we’d get a snake in the tent, but we were still alive in the morning so everything was fine.

Eating dinner and watching the sun go down.....

At 6:30am we got up and packed the tent; we then walked 2km back to the road and waited to catch a bus back to Simunye. Thank god it was a BUS this time, because that battered old kombi would’ve definitely died!

We manage to get on our way back to Big Bend fairly quickly and uneventfully and then head to the sugar cane fields for some Easter clay pigeon shooting! 

Watching the men do the rounds of the shooting at the stations made me quite nervous, the shotgun was pretty big and the recoil on the shoulder looked pretty tough! We were allowed a go at the end and it was awesome! Neither Ashley or I hit anything but it was just a buzz to actually shoot a real gun, the recoil wasn’t half as bad as it looked and the shoulder bruise that it left just makes you feel like a badass.
We also did target practice on some drinks cans (again not really hitting anything apart from the wooden stand) with a revolver, a pistol and a glock. The handguns were much easier to use than the shotgun, and the target wasn’t moving so you could focus better. I have to say that going from never shooting a real gun to learning how to load, shoot and unload four types in one day – it’s pretty interesting.

Happy Easter Everyone!

Love Kate xx
 

Umlungu

It’s getting to that point now where we’re well settled in on the projects and everything we do comes as second nature. There’s no stressing out about how to do things or fighting with language barriers that you don’t understand. We can now pretty much comprehend most of the SiSwati that the children use when talking to us, and their English is coming on very nicely so they can ask us for things and we actually know what they mean!

My class at Injabulo are coming along in leaps and bounds, I have the crocodiles (the older class) therefore I have some of the children who were with us last year too. This makes my life 10 times easier because the ones who know the answers always repeat them and the new children copy – so when it comes to teaching there’s a lot less work that I need to put in on some topics. Maths however is disappointing; they don’t understand simple addition so that’s going to be something that I’ll need to work on!
The original plan for Injabulo was to use an immersion method with the children; i.e. we speak English and only English, and if you can’t ask for something in English you don’t ask for it at all. However we came to realise that this wasn’t feasible; trying to run a classroom totally in a language that none of the children really understand is impossible, you achieve very little and become highly stressed. Either way they are still picking up the language very quickly, they’re like little sponges! They know all the shapes/colours/body parts/numbers/animals/days of the week/months/seasons/clothing in English and they’re picking up some helpful sentences and phrases too; they all ask to go to the toilet in English, ask for a drink in English, say they’re hungry and ask for food in English... and this is only the beginning.

We’ve had a little bit of drama at Moriah this week; on Wednesday one of the little boys’ poo’d himself and somehow Ashley and I ended up to be the ones dealing with it! We had to get him to take all his clothes off and put him in the outside shower to wash down, Ashley was hilarious because as soon as she got one whiff as he stepped out of his pants she ran off to a nearby tree coughing and spluttering with streaming eyes and ‘chundered everyyywhaaaar!’ It was pretty bad, I had to get a medical glove and poop-a-scoop his soiled clothes up into a bag to send home as a lovely surprise for his Mum.
Just to make the whole ordeal less embarrassing for the poor lad his teacher decided to bring his whole class out to the garden in full view of us washing him, and two workmen on break on the other side of the preschool fence decided that this was an interesting watch and basically perved on the entire thing. Weirdos.

Everyday we’re constantly trying and trying to come up with new ways of improving things at soup kitchen; so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to sell snacks to the girls in hostel so that we can give Aunty Vinah the money to help out with feeding the children/bus fares to school. We’re selling crisps and ices, which are only bringing in a small profit but I’m sure it will soon add up!
This week at soup kitchen we also handed out some baby clothes to the Mothers who come with their little ones; the clothes had been kindly donated by one of the female teachers at Sisekelo, and I’m pretty sure they were brand new and had never been worn. There’s nothing else to really say on this subject but OMG LOOK AT HOW CUTE THE BABIES ARE... awwwwwwwww.

On Friday night Ashley, three prefects from Sisekelo and myself had been summoned to UPS (Ubombo Primary School) for the honour of helping out at their annual camp-out for their Grade R to Grade 3’s (in terms you will understand, that’s reception to year 3).
Our assigned task was to make sure that all the kids were having fun, supervise them and make sure no one died... which was an incredibly difficult task seeing as I was supervising the bouncy castle (or as they call it in Swaziland – the ‘jumpy’ castle). All of these children can speak fluent English, so either; they couldn’t understand my accent (not very likely) or they completely ignored me, which is definitely more realistic.
There were about 20 kids all on the bouncy castle and they all wanted to come down the slide at the same time – this resulted in large Grade 3 boys landing on the heads of petite Grade R girls, and there were a fair few tears. Due to the congestion at the top of the slide, the sides of the castle started pulling in and became soft, so a boy and a girl tumbled head first from the top of the slide and narrowly missed impaling themselves on the electric pump attached to the castle, but they managed to scrape themselves on a few wooden barrier poles. Well done. And I had to scrape them up off the field; luckily I was prepared for the next two to do it, and I caught both of them... saving my reputation with the parents, ha!

Later on that night there was a braii for all the kids and parents; in preparation for this Ashley and I carried a 5 foot long cooler box packed with steak for the equivalent of 100m, but with added stairs. This thing was HEAVY – I swear that there was a full cow in there... and thanks to information provided afterwards we found out that a cow actually had been donated for the braii at the campout. So yeah, I bet you’ve never carried a cow.
After the braii the kids put on a talent show for everyone to watch; this involved groups of girls around the ages of 5-7 shaking everything their Mamma gave them in a more provocative way than 19 year olds do when they’re ‘oot on the toon’ in Newcastle. Rather disturbing but I have to give it to them; I wish I could do that.
Our main job description was to ‘make the children tired’; we might as well have been told to make pigs fly. CHILDREN DO NOT GET TIRED. They’ve been eating sweets all day, drinking fizzy drinks and they’re covered in face-paint pretending to be spider man – they’re on a constant sugar rush, and the later it gets the more hyper they become. Their unyielding love and enthusiasm for Gangnam Style means that it is basically played on loop for the whole night and every time that tune reaches their ears it turns them into a screaming, invisible horse riding frenzy.

Glorified Babysitters ;)

Getting into the spirit of things!

It’s 1:30am and they’re still playing a mass game of musical chairs; the three prefects have given up and gone to sleep in the tent, Ashley somehow still has energy to conduct the game of musical chairs and I’m struggling to press pause and play on the iPod... finally they’re told to go to bed and we crash on the floor of our tent around 2am to the screams of the still awake children.

On Sunday we had another farewell braii for a couple that attend the church we go to; they’re retiring and moving to South Africa so we were all invited round for a braii in the garden and a short service. They had a trampoline inset into the ground which some of the children were playing on; then Ashley went over to have a go... this trampoline had many springs missing, the remaining ones were brown with rust and the actual trampoline itself was sun bleached and threadbare. You guessed it, she went right through! Tore a hole in it the heifer.

On return to hostel we found out that we’d missed out on the most dramatic dinner ever; a girl had thrown up on another girls’ food. Always missing out on the banter!

We have a long weekend this week – looking forward to it!

UNIVERSITY OF YORK ACCEPTED ME – too happy. Had a little cry on the phone to Mum when she rang me and told me, ha, what a baby I am.

Hope you’re all enjoying life :)

Kate xx

P.S. ‘Umlungu’ means white person in SiSwati; two little boys shouted it as us as we were getting on a kombi at Matata. It’s not offensive though. 

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It

This week we’re back into the regular routine of preschool hopping and soup kitchen madness!

On Ashley’s return we took advantage of some of the goodies that her Mum had brought out, and we cracked open a sherbet dip. This then escalated rather quickly from eating it to being really immature and deciding to relive our younger years... can you guess? Yeah, we sniffed it.
As anyone else stupid enough to do this will know, allowing sherbet up your nostrils is ALWAYS a bad idea; things fizz where things should never fizz, your brain hurts and I swear on my life my eyeball felt like it was going to explode. We had fun though. Apart from the next two hours where I felt like the left side of my brain was spazming and I could taste blood. Kids, don’t try this at home.

On a more mature note this week I had a Skype interview with my first choice University, The University of York! I have my doubts with how well this interview went because when the guy asked me what my favourite film was (bearing in mind I’m applying for TV and Film Production) the names of all the films I’ve ever watched in my life dissolved right there in my brain. I couldn’t think of anything. Call me a sceptic but I really don’t think I made the best of impressions, all I can do now is cross my fingers and hope they’ll pick me regardless of my idiocy. Oh well.

On Friday we had a Red Nose Day/Birthday Day at Injabulo! Nelsiwe’s birthday was going to be on Saturday 16^th so we would miss it; therefore we threw her a little birthday bash with cake, relight-able candles, red noses and polony sandwiches... what more do you want?!

Swazi's are always happy with chocolate.... ;)

We explained Comic Relief and Red Nose Day to all the children, but no one (including Nelsiwe) had ever heard of it... Clearly Comic Relief needs to get it’s ass to Swaziland! So even though the concept of the day was lost on them we cracked out the red paint and gave them all little red noses, which they loved. We also put on some kids songs and had a little kids ‘disco’ for the last half hour of preschool... this quickly turned into Ashley being dragged to the floor and piled on my about 30 4 year olds with my fate to quickly follow. You wouldn’t think it but a large group of 3-4 year olds are pretty strong when they have the right determination, and it doesn’t take them long to reduce you to the concrete floor and crush the living daylights out of you.

Red Noses!

Cuties.

This brings us to the weekend, and the section of this blog where I reveal the source of the title; on Saturday Ashley and I set off in the blazing midday heat to walk for over an hour to buy a chicken. In lowveld Swaziland you can come by a pretty hefty living chicken for E45 (£3.20), so that’s exactly what we did. With Mary (one of the teachers from Moriah Centre) we ended the chicken-less leg (no pun intended) of our journey in Game 5, one of the villages in Big Bend. We entered a large building that was built by the community to be a preschool, but due to no one wanting to pay school fees it is how used to keep chickens. Crazy right. Anyway, after Mary chased the fattest chicken around a preschool classroom we paid the E45 for our poultry and set off back for Moriah Centre.

Ashley began the stint with the chicken cradled in her arms and she made it successfully down the road for about 500 metres before our dinner tried to make a ‘Chicken Run’, hahaa.  This resulted in chicken squawks coupled with whatever panicked noise Ashley was making as she tried her best not to let our dinner escape; holding the chicken by its feet, it was dangling upside down and flapping frantically until Mary came to the rescue... later we discovered that during this debacle the chicken had broken its left wing. Yeah, we’re not great at this stuff.

Some crazy preschool...

So we finally returned back to Moriah Centre, covered in minimal amounts of excrement with one ruffled and highly traumatised chicken in tow.  It then met its fate, or should it be called its destiny? After all this chicken had been bred, born and fed for the sole reason of being sold for food... so I reckon destiny is a more appropriate word to use.
Ashley and I watched Mary as she sawed through the squirming chickens’ neck with an unfortunately tiny knife, and looked on in awe and disgust as the white feathers were stained a bright red and blood squirted out in tiny jets from the main arteries. It was then tossed into a bucket of boiling hot water to be plucked, it was still quivering and partly alive until Mary ripped the rest of the head off and proceeded in pulling off all the feathers and cutting off the feet. Honestly it is one of the grimmest things I’ve ever watched, body parts were flying everywhere, the head was still dangling and it was starting to cook as it sat in the boiling water, so I kept getting these wafts of partly cooking chicken.  The next stage was Mary disappearing inside to wash the chicken out and then returning to us with a bowl filled with all of the chickens’ insides and its feet, yum.

 Before I got to Swaziland I wouldn’t even eat meat off the bone, it was chicken breast and sausages all the way... I am now over that fad as hostel doesn’t really allow for picky eaters. But being presented with an animal’s entrails is a completely different story all together; to my credit I sucked it up and got on with it. So I have now eaten a whole chicken intestine and half a chicken foot... and you know what, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Intestine tastes exactly like chicken meat and I could eat it again if I REALLY had to, but the foot is another story; the meat is stretchy and rubbery and you’re literally gnawing on a claw – you can’t pretend it’s anything else but. I did not enjoy the foot. 

'Bon Appetit!

Anyway, it’s a different experience and I came out of the other end alive. So maybe saying yes to weird things isn’t a bad thing!

After the slaughter day we had a more civilised say on Sunday; we had a lovely braii and some drinks with a friend from hostel and one of his schoolmates from Sisekelo. He’s origionally from the USA but moved to Swaziland when he was 10, he’s now in the RAF and is based in the UK; he tries to visit Swaziland every year so we basically intruded on their reunion. We had a lovely time though, some proper bits of chicken washed down with quite a bit of cider. Perfect end to a weekend.  

Love you all...

Kate xx

P.S. The laminator works, it’s a miracle.

P.P.S - this is my new room-mate, he's a gecko and he eats the mosquito's... I still get bitten but definitely less than I did before!  

Mrs Kate

So, today is Mothers Day and I know that my Mum will be reading this because she begs me to put up blogs when I fall behind, so I would just like to use this opportunity to say; HAPPY MOTHERS DAY ALLY D! You’re the best and if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t even be where I am today. Miss and love you.  Xxx

Also; I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT IT IS THE 10^TH OF MARCH, I really have no idea where the time is going. One minute you’re doing the Bloukrans Bridge Bungee or sitting on Table Mountain and the next time you look it’s nearly 3 months ago that those things happened. Holy crap.

In contrast to prior expectation this week was incredibly different from my assumptions; Kathy (my host) phoned me on Sunday night asking if I would like to spend the week with them in Manzini working at her new school, Enjabulweni. Enjabulweni is similar to Sisekelo (where I live) as it is a private school and all of the children come from well-off families. Some are seriously well-off; I met one of the Kings daughters. Working with privileged children isn’t normally my style, but Enjabulweni has a ‘Learning Centre’ which provides a space for special needs children to receive the attention that they need... and that is where I have been working all week.
Unfortunately in Swaziland special needs and disabilities aren’t widely recognised and children who do have these problems aren’t always provided for in the correct ways – especially in rural areas where there’s nowhere for them to be helped academically; so if they were fortunate enough to be at school but couldn’t manage the workload they would just be branded as stupid. This is a massive shame because with the right attention they could manage the workload and progress academically, but instead they are landed with physical jobs from a young age (such as becoming cow herders) and it is their responsibility to look after that herd until they’re too old to do so, or someone else takes over. 
The ‘Learning Centre’ at Enjabulweni is one of the only (if not THE only) place in the whole of Swaziland that provides this attention for children with special needs; there’s a permanent audiologist/speech therapist, occupational therapist and teacher to help the children.

My first day at the Enjabulweni Learning Centre was different from what I had expected; I was expecting there to be some physically disabled children as well as those with mental/social disabilities but there wasn’t. Most of the children there have learning disabilities which makes them unable to be in normal classrooms with other pupils as they aren’t at the same academic level as their peers or they have behavioural problems which makes them disruptive.
Two of the children Muke and Banelele are down’s syndrome; they have very short attention spans which means they need one on one time all the time, if someone isn’t sat with them they won’t work. Muke has brilliant speech, he’s originally from Johannesburg so speaks English perfectly but sounds a little American sometimes! He’s also rather effeminate and was always saying ‘Mrs Kate Mrs Kate, can I tie your hair Mrs Kate?’, and wanting to read Princess books.
Banelele on the other hand had very slurred speech and is very difficult to understand; I was working mostly with her all week and it is really slow going, even when she knows the answers you have to battle to get each one out of her as she’s always wanting to wander around, rub things out, lie down on the table or just stares blankly at you and refuses to listen.

Two boys called Thando and Tsepo had ADHD; in the classroom they just seemed like normal kids because they got on with their work quietly and the work they were doing was correct for their age group. However at break time they went crazy, once they had been let free of the classroom they developed too much energy! So when they came back inside after break time they couldn’t concentrate on anything, they wanted to get puzzles out, run around and were generally disruptive to the others.
Ayabonga and Thelive are both autistic; however their autism is very different... Ayabonga doesn’t really talk that much and he throws random temper tantrums in the classroom over nothing, there’s a ‘soft corner’ in the classroom with blankets and pillows and more often than not you would find him curled up there. As well as the temper tantrums he has a habit of running off; every day I was there he ran off at least once; he would sprint across the field towards the high school or would run into the primary school building, take his shoes off and hide in a little cubby hole, he’s quite the handful! However he is very clever, mathematically brilliant and can read and write in English perfectly even though he rarely speaks.
Thelive on the other hand just comes across as an insanely annoying, spoilt egotistical brat. Sounds quite harsh but it’s true, the occupational therapist explained to me that he had been very introverted and didn’t socialise at all but since starting at the Centre he’s done a complete U-turn and is now at the total extrovert extreme. He would dance around the class singing silly songs, telling everyone ‘look at me look at me I’m amazing, I’m the best’ etc, and trying to grab at Ricky (a guy who helps out) saying ‘I love you Ricky, I love you my boyfriend, I’m gay Ricky’ and wanting to hug him all the time.
Lastly is Mihle; Mihle is a girl who is deaf and blind – recently she started wearing hearing aids but is still getting used to hearing sounds and she’s not sure what to listen to yet, I think she also has partial sight because I would see her holding crayons up to her face (basically at her eyeball) to see the colour and then she would lay her face on the paper before colouring in a picture. She communicates through touch and has her own signals for telling people what she wants, she can say the word ‘no’ but other than that she just makes clicking noises or humming noises. Because of the two disabilities she can get easily confused and when she becomes confused or upset she gets very violent; she lashes out at people and throws things that a near to her. Sometimes she ends up hurting herself because she can’t see what she’s doing.

Woking with these children this week has been a different experience for me; it has shown me that there are all kinds of people who need to be helped, no matter what background they come from. Unfortunately by the time it came to the end of the week my patience was also coming to an end; I felt awful because the kids weren’t deliberately being difficult but after a week of fighting for every single answer I was getting tired of sitting with them and never feeling like they were 100% listening or wanting to work. You give someone your unconditional attention for hours on end and they don’t want to work; but as soon as you walk away to help someone else they turn around and shout ‘Mrs Kate please helping me!?’, so you go back to them and then they pick up where they left off... lying on the table or ignoring you.
I’m making it sound like I’ve had a horrible week here, but I haven’t! It has been great, it’s just that I don’t think I’m cut out for working with children like this full time... honestly, I’d take our 80 screaming, fighting, non-English speaking preschoolers any day over 7 English speaking children who 3 of which only work if you talk them through each second of the day.

I take my hat off to anyone who is in this profession full-time; you are a saint and have more patience than I could ever wish for.

Living with Kathy and Richard this week has been a nice change from hostel; I love living in hostel but staying with Kathy and Richard is similar to being back home, lovely home-cooked meals in front of the TV, Hunters cider bought especially for you because you don’t like wine, internet, a double bed and take-out pizza one evening!
My one favourite thing about being in Manzini this whole week was simply this; being in Manzini. Manzini is at a higher altitude than Big Bend, so on an evening it actually gets cool, twice this week I was COLD – now that’s something I haven’t felt for a long time. Goose-bumps even made an appearance, amazing!

After a hectic kombi journey back to Big Bend on Friday morning I arrived with the task of cooking for soup kitchen alone, always stressful. Made twice as stressful because I had been in Manzini so had twice as much food to cook! Thankfully the Aunties helped me out and even washed up the big cooking pot for me (which I had burned to a crisp so it must have taken hours to scour out), I felt awful because it was a massive job so I repaid the Aunty with some Dairy Milk chocolate that Ingrid had given us... she seemed perfectly happy. 
Turned up to soup kitchen to see all of the kids harvesting Aunty Vinah’s maize field, she’s taking the maize and putting it into her new granary so that it can be ground to make pap. After I’d served and all the kids went home I went down to Aunty Vinah’s house and helped her fill ice bags with juice so that she could make ice-blocks to sell, she was pretty impressed with my bag tying skills so looks like I’ve got a back up profession, haha!

Saturday I made myself get productive and finally made some weather posters for my classroom which had been sat waiting to be done for over a month on my desk. At the very last page the laminator decided to screw me over and created an almighty jam, this one I couldn’t even pull out. Off I went to find a screwdriver and I had to dismantle the whole machine, remove the rollers and slide out the jam. So 3 hours later I’m covered in oil, screws are lying all over my room and I’ve suffered a pretty big electric shock that made me jump two foot in the air and left my right hand spasming, but the jam is gone! So now I’m basically a mechanic of laminators, I definitely screwed everything back in where it came out of, I just hope that it functions properly... Let’s hope so. Yikes.

The terrible state of my room... and the laminator.

THE JAM OF PURE EVIL

Ashley is back today, so I can’t wait to hear the stories of her South Africa adventures!

Over and out...

Kate xx

P.S. Two legendary quotes from Muke this week:
“The Queen has brown hair, like Michael Jackson’.
“You have beautiful shiny hair like Rapunzel and Barbie and Beyonce, are you Rapunzel?”
What can I say, this kid loves hair!

“What’s it doing now?” “Spraying urine.”

This week has been a busy but fun week! Last Sunday Ashley’s Mum Jane and Step-father Paul arrived in the country so since then it has been a hectic mash-up of showing them our projects and trying to give them a real Swazi experience!

The day they arrived we went in the hire car to Malolotja Nature Reserve which is past Mbabane and right up in the highvelds of Swaziland. It was COLD; I had goose bumps and I was shivering. The Tree Top Canopy Tour’s base was on the top of a hill in the reserve; the wind was blowing, it was overcast and I hadn’t brought anything warm – I keep forgetting that Big Bend is the hottest place in Swaziland; you basically wear the least amount of clothes that’s socially acceptable.
We were so high up that when you looked out over the mountains the clouds were literally sitting on the summits, it was beautiful.
Ashley, Paul and I did the Malolotja Tree Top Canopy Tour; which was a series of zip lines that took you from the top of a valley in the game reserve to the bottom. It was great fun! You could go seriously fast on the zip lines and when you were hanging over the valley you could look right over the carpet of treetops beneath you and hear the river gurgling below.

Cloud Level!

After the Tree Tops we headed to ‘Swazi Candles’; Swazi Candles along with some other independent shops come together to create a lovely Craft Market in Malkerns near Manzini. The place is full of hundreds and hundreds of handmade candles all with a Swazi/African feel to them; there are 2 or 3 people who sit in the shop itself to make the candles for shoppers to watch, but in total there are 12 candle makers in a small workshop elsewhere. We saw one man make an elephant from a ball of wax in about 5 minutes flat, the craftsman ship is amazing and the candles really are beautifully made!

Monday brought Injabulo into the lives of Jane and Paul; the kids went absolutely crazy (as they do when we get any visitors) and carried on their new obsession of stroking manly arm hair... They really are fascinated, I think it must be because black people have less body hair than white people – they must think we’re some sort of animal! 

Jane and Paul had brought out 3 30kg suitcases from the UK, and about 50kg of their luggage was toys, presents and clothes for the kids. So at Injabulo on Monday they had a whale of a time throwing bean bags around and dressing up as princesses, ladybirds, Woody from Toy Story and a Little Miss from The Mr Men!

(Jane and Paul's Pictures)

(Jane and Paul's Pictures)

Tuesday was the Moriah Center; the day started out great as we were reading a story that included making popcorn for all the kids to eat... They loved watching the popcorn maker spit out the popcorn; however they had to wait a little while longer to try some because the teachers were more interested in eating all of the popcorn their selves rather than handing it out to the children, haha! 

Unfortunately at play time the day took a turn for the worst; one little boy came up to us in the playground crying and he had a plastic truck toy sticking out of his side. Two of the wheels had came off and we presumed that there was an exposed metal spike which had lodged itself into his skin. We’re still not sure how it happened; we thought he had fallen on it, but the rest of the kids said that someone threw it at him and it got stuck... no one is sure how it happened.
Luckily Jane and Paul had the car there so we managed to get him to the private hospital down the road in 2 minutes of it happening. The doctors weren’t sure how deep the metal was so they had to give him a full anaesthetic to knock him out in case he wriggled when they were removing the truck. Thankfully the metal wasn’t deep enough to puncture anything and all he needed was a few stitches and some medicine.
Everything turned out fine; but if Jane and Paul hadn’t been there we don’t know what would’ve happened, the kombi we usually drive was in South Africa because the missionaries had been taken to Pongola in it. Inevitably we would have been in a horrible situation if it wasn’t for their car, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it out because we wouldn’t have known the extent of the damage so we would have had to carry him 20 minutes to hospital.

After the drama at Moriah on the morning we headed off to Hlane the Royal National Park for a sunset safari! We saw loads of rhino, impala (obviously)and warthog; we also saw elephants for the first time! I couldn’t have been any more excited and I was not disappointed, there was a herd of about 8 elephants and the bull was MASSIVE. It was walking directly behind our truck and at one point I’m pretty sure it started charging at us because it picked up some speed, started flapping its ears and our ranger put his foot down pretty hastily to get us away. Amazing.
After what I now call a hideously expensive dinner (E140 - £10), we watched all the staff of Hlane do a traditional Swazi dance, the third proper one that we have seen... and by far the longest. I love watching them dance but it is rather repetitive and when it goes on for about 40 minutes you start to get a little bit bored. But at the end everyone got up together and had a bit of a stomp around with the staff before retiring to their paraffin lit huts. There’s no electricity in the accommodation at Hlane so you have to put paraffin lamps everywhere to create some light, personally I love it as I feel that electricity kills the atmosphere of sleeping in a hut even if it has a kitchen, bathroom, living room, two double rooms and a platform in the rafters with four single beds! This was a party hut for sure, it was brilliant.

Perfection.

Swazi Secrets

The next morning we left Hlane and went to a factory called Swazi Secrets; Swazi Secrets produce beauty products from the oil extracted from the Marula nut.    

Every year in March the people of Swaziland celebrate Marula season by drinking the traditional Swazi beer ‘buganu’, I have spoken about it before on this blog. After the women have used the actual fruits to ferment and make the beer they take the nut from the fruits and dry them for weeks in the sun. During March/April time the workers of Swazi Secrets go out into the rural impoverished communities of the lowveld areas of Swaziland to buy the marula nuts from the local women who have made the beer; they weigh the nuts/kernels on the spot and pay by cash per kg.

Marula Tree

They then take these kernels to the Mpaka factory to be crushed by hand and the oil to be extracted and made into beauty products. Instead of having one large mechanical machine that crushes the nuts Swazi Secrets have opted for a number of smaller man-powered machines that crush smaller quantities of nuts. For every 40kg of nuts crushed 11kg of pure marula oil is gained.
The smaller machines make the extraction process much more sustainable as each machine has the community name written on it; therefore only the nuts from that community may be crushed in that machine. Therefore if there’s a bad batch of products the workers can trace which machine the nuts were crushed in and then know which community the nuts were bought from; this allows them to pull the rest of the communities batch for testing before shipping and they can go back to the community and find out what caused the marula nuts to be contaminated.
Whereas if all of their nuts were crushed together they would have to destroy larger batches of products without knowing the problem, so the smaller machines prevent cross-contamination, promote sustainability of the factory’s process and they save money!

Crushing the kernels for natural oil

The visit really was very interesting and we were shown around the production room where the products are actually made. It couldn’t have been any larger than a store room and there were 3 workers in there doing everything by hand; one lady was painstakingly heating up and measuring out ingredients for marula lip-balm by hand (this allows higher control of the temperature so that the oil doesn’t degrade at a too high heat), and man was packaging the lip-balms into their containers while another lady stamped on the date of expiry. 

After seeing this production on such a small scale I wasn’t expecting the company to be large or well known; therefore it surprised me when they said that they export to the UK and Germany and their products are very popular in Europe, they have even been given a ‘Product of the Year’ award by Elle! 

The company is also co-funded by the WK Kellogg Foundation, that’s right, the very same Kellogg that brings you your cornflakes in the morning. 

I really enjoyed our visit to Swazi Secrets and it is fantastic knowing that they are supporting the rural women in the communities who harvest the raw materials; these communities include places that we are very familiar with... For example Mpolongeni where we run our soup kitchen is one of the areas that provide Swazi Secrets with marula kernels for crushing, and I think that it is fantastic that there are some companies out there who are dedicated to providing fair business to the Swazi population.

www.swazisecrets.com

Thursday brought soup kitchen with Jane and Paul! The first thing that Aunty Vinah said to them was along the lines of ‘where are the surprises?!’, although what she was getting wasn’t really a surprise because she had been asking for chocolates ever since we arrived in the country.
Either way she was happy with her gifts and there were even more clothes that had been brought for the kids to wear; I’m pretty sure that we’ve clothed these children about 3 times over in the time that we've been here!
One of the little girls at soup kitchen, SiSi pleasantly surprised me this week; she’s the one in the pictures that always wears the white and blue chequered shower cap. She never smiles, is really timid and gets scared really easily, but this week is was like she was a different person!
She was smiling, laughing, letting me tickle her, hugging me rather than sitting rigid in my arms and gripping on like a little monkey. I even started jiggling her around in my arms (which normally terrifies her) but this time she stared throwing herself into it, laughing and waving her arms around.
I know that this probably doesn’t make sense to you but after knowing someone for 6 months and suddenly seeing a personality change for the better just made me feel so proud and happy for her, it’s like she’s a new little girl and I don’t know what has happened to make the change but I am grateful that it has happened.  I just hope it carries on and she doesn’t go back into her shell.

We finished off Jane and Pauls visit with a trip to Manzini to see Kathy and Richard and eat at our favourite Portuguese Manzini restaurant, Gil Vicente (one that we have been seeing quite a lot of lately!)

So now Ashley, Jane and Paul are gallivanting around South Africa, they’re currently in Durban before going to Cape Town and finally Johannesburg. 

So for a week I am alone on project and running everything by myself, hahaaa let’s see how this goes shall we?!

I am interested to see what this week brings, hopefully there will be no more drama otherwise I will have a lot on my plate... Wish me luck!

Kate xx

P.S. The name of this blog is a quote from our ranger on safari at Hlane; Paul asked him what a rhino was doing now and he bluntly replied ‘spraying urine’. His accent and the way he said it reduced Ashley and I too immature fits of laughter for about 5 minutes straight and I almost chocked on my Hunters Dry. It’s a memory I will cherish forever.