“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

Belated Halloween, Baby Birds and Bust Tyres

This week has been a true Big Bend scorcher; it’s so hot I’m sure that I sweat even as I shower – there’s a nice image for you all. The kids at Injabulo have taken to stripping off in class, so they all run around in basically no clothes and I’ve taken to fanning them with sheets of A3 laminated paper. Air-con Swazi style!

On Tuesday we took the Americans to soup kitchen with us, however I should probably stop referring to them as ‘The Americans’ because they all have names. We took the ‘young ones’ along with us; Kahlie (pronounced as Kayleigh), Blas (pronounced like the ‘blos’ from blossom) and Kent (nice easy name!) all in their twenties. They absolutely loved hanging out with the kids at soup kitchen and we handed out blankets that had been donated by their church years ago to The Moriah Centre... but had never been used! Aunty Vina was chuffed with the blankets for the orphans, and they all sang a thank you song to us, bless them.

On the same night we decided that we were going to join in on something that the Missionaries were doing, so after soup kitchen Ashley, Kahlie, Blas, Kent and myself all piled into a small bucky with a South African man named Eurie (who is an absolute legend and possibly one of the funniest men ever) and we drove out to some community in the middle of nowhere. It was dark, cold and the community was half way up the side of a hill, so it was windy as anything. Not knowing this previously I was sat there in cut-offs, a t-shirt and wearing no mosquito spray – I was in for a treat tonight.  The Missionaries were projecting ‘The Jesus Film’ onto the side of a building for the community to watch, luckily it was a remake of the original (the original is over 3 hours long), so I only had to endure being a mosquito’s midnight snack for around 1 hour and 30 minutes. It was interesting to watch though, and since we’ve been attending church every Sunday and one of the preschools we teach at is a Christian preschool there was quite a hefty amount of quotes that I could recognise for everything we’ve been teaching... I’m learning and I didn’t even realise ;) 

This week was also Halloween! Okay, Halloween was ‘officially’ last week, but we’d punctured the truck tyre so we missed the 31^st October at Injabulo. But we’d put so much effort into the lesson plan; we had printed off 60 masks, bought apples and oranges and ‘borrowed’ black bin liners from the kitchen so that we could black out the windows – couldn’t let all that work go to waste. Plus, as I’ve made you all aware Swaziland isn’t exactly a massive Halloween celebrator, I could tell them that Halloween runs alongside Easter and they’d probably just believe me ;)
We had so much fun with the kids making masks, playing ‘Stick the Spider on the Web’, apple bobbing and colouring pumpkin faces onto oranges... They loved it and Ashley even hid in the corner of the classroom with a scary mask on and jumped out on them all! There’s a fantastic video of it and they are reduced to screaming wrecks and all pile on top of one another on the floor.

Halloween masks and pumpkin oranges! Grrrrr.

Nelsiwe and Baby Ciara (Sierra), and Ciara looks happy!
She never looks happy, clearly loving Halloween :D

APPLE BOBBING!

The drive back from Injabulo turned a brilliant day slightly less brilliant; the previously punctured (then fixed) tyre decided to blow. We had to rope in some Swazi men to help us jack it up and try to pump the tyre; unfortunately the tyre was a complete goner and they said we’d have to change it. Shame that the spare tyre under the TOYOTA hasn’t seen daylight for a good few years, and they had a right hassle trying to free it! Richard and his Gardner came to the rescue after we’d called him and explained the situation... he wasn’t too happy about the wrecked tyre.

Whaaaaaaaaaat.

After we crawled back on the newly attached, old spare tyre at 40km/h we decided that we should wash the truck. We’d broken it again so the least we could do was make it look presentable. Right on time the Swazi weather kicked in and a thunderstorm and rainstorm hit us at full pelt – it was warm rain though so we had fun being out in the rain washing the truck. Ashley didn’t want her hair to get wet though, so tapping into her Swazi roots she took a bright yellow Shoprite bag and tied it around her head, sexy look! 

True Swazi right here....

Friday and Saturday were shopping days! We have finally bought all 60 Christmas presents for all the children at Injabulo, and we’re now popular customers in PEP (Swaziland’s answer to Primark, but it’s even CHEAPER). There’s not a new tyre for the truck yet, so we had to take a public Kombi to Injabulo on Friday, therefore when we did our shopping on the way back there was no way we could fit into a Kombi again with 60 backpacks and 60 pairs of shoes! Luckily the manager of PEP was lovely to us as we were big spenders (around E4000 between us, nearly £300), and she wangled us a lift back to Big Bend with someone she knew. She also let us have E100 worth of free stuff each from the shop as a thank you for pretty much clearing the shelves, haha... So we both got new pillows to replace the lame excuses for pillows that we have at hostel, and I chose some new sandals. Pretty decent, that would never happen back home.

Only 1/4 of all the shoes we bought - CUTE

Saturday we were back in PEP, all the staff said hello to us and I’m pretty sure we will be remembered in that shop from now on. This time we were buying the clothes for the children, it was so fun choosing out all the cute little tops for the girls and there are some gorgeous little shorts and vests for the boys!

Back in Big Bend we bought toys and sweets for their presents too; every £10 donated bought a child a new backpack, a pair of shoes, clothes, toys, sweets, a pencil case (with pens, colours, ruler, scissors, rubber, sharpener etc) and a folder for all of their work to go in. LIKE I SAID, SWAZILAND IS CHEAP.

So I would just like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who donated to us, you are going to make these children very happy – and I’ll make sure we get lots of pictures of them with their new presents for you all to see!

After a busy weekend we had Saturday night out to have some fun! £6, 7 drinks and two bars down we rolled up to a house party – don’t ask me who’s I have no idea. There were massive speakers in the garden blaring out African House music and there was food on, it was perfect. I tried out my African House dancing in the garden with some of the friends that we’ve made here, luckily it was dark and I’m sure people’s memories are a bit blurry, so I don’t think I embarrassed myself too much!
The late night food was salad, pap and beef – typically Swazi; the beef was spiced and it was amazing, I cannot stress how good this beef was. Everyone keeps telling me how I was going on and on about the beef, but compared to hostel beef it was heaven. It was heaven regardless. We got back around 3:30 and tucked into a doughnut that I’d bought earlier that day, and some salted crackers that were floating about my room... Need to get some decent food in for such occasions!
Either way it was a great night and took some of the stress off from our busy week, if you look really hard there are things to do in Big Bend :P

Ashley, Idumiso (works at Sisekelo) and Myself :)

ALSO MY PARCELS ARRIVED. YAY.

2 out of the 3 that should be here - result for the moment ;)

Buzzing when you find Christmas Presents from your Grandparents <3

THE AFTERMATH

I feel like I should explain the title of this post; the only mystery now is the ‘baby bird’ section of the title. At Moriah Centre on Thursday one of the boys had something in his hand, Ashley walked over to see what it was and he threw what was in his hand at her face! Turns out it was a traumatised baby bird and it flapped frantically, causing Ashley to absolutely soil her pants, scream the place down and leg it to the other side of the room. Apart from suffering only a minor heart attack she was okay, but I couldn’t believe how mean they were to this tiny bird; they kept picking it up by its wings and chucking it on the floor. So I saved it and went to hide it away from their mean little hands – there’s definitely a different attitude to animals here than there is back home.

Evil Children :( Traumatised and half dead bird.

Also this week I caught a few our boys at Injabulo throwing rocks at passing herds of cows; one it’s mean, and two it’s dangerous! The cows literally walk right through the playground area and if one of them spooked we could have a dead child on our hands. They knew I wasn’t happy with them, you should see their faces when they’re getting told off – they look like butter wouldn’t melt.

Love to you all, start sending my Christmas presents now ;)

Kate xx

P.S. I regret to inform you all that I’ve become a true Swazi and gone to the toilet out in the open. Ashley and I were desperate at Injabulo and the toilets themselves are vile, so we had to wee around the back of the toilet block. Some of the kids followed us around too (they never leave you alone!) and I’m pretty sure one of the little girls has now seen my white bum exposed to the world. How embarrassing.
It’s not even like I’ve never had a wee outside before, I have, plenty of times. But you hide to do it! There’s nowhere to hide here, and the toilet block is right next to a homestead. People might walk past and any moment and if someone looked out of their window at the right moment I’m sure they received a lovely eyeful!