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Okay, so this week on Monday we were at Moriah Centre and they received a massive delivery of free (going out of date) food, drinks and other items from Matata Spar (Spar is exactly the same here as it is in England, so no confusion there).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 the food!

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. 

Views from our tent over the mountains!

Jaw-dropping.

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.

Shewula Sunset

Eating our dinner watching the sun do 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
 

Swaziland Facts!

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

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

2013

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

Looking Like a Tourist

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Kate xx

When the Polokwane Girls Came to Stay

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

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

The girls at Soup Kitchen!

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

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

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

Having a bash at the Cultural Dancing :D

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

Paul

Traditional Homesteads 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legends Backpackers with some cheeky drinks!

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

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

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

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

Kate xxx