Napoleon the Safari Legend

Plans to take the kids from Injabulo and Moriah to Hlane Royal Nature Reserve on school trips had been underway for quite some time; and finally the time came and we had two weeks filled of children, nature reserves, wild animals and stress.

Injabulo School Trips

To make things even more difficult on ourselves we decided to do something nice for the kids at Injabulo; I do enjoy doing lovely things for them, it’s just that you have a really great idea and then you realise that you have to repeat that really great idea at least 60 times. So, we hit PEP once again (the shop workers in there are basically our family now) to buy 60 blank t-shirts on which we were going to write ‘Injabulo Preschool’ and ‘Hlane 2013’ – yes, that’s right, PRESCHOOL TOUR T-SHIRTS!
After a full weekend of nothing but writing these exact words on t-shirts over and over again I was so sick of it that I would be happy if I never have to see another t-shirt again in my life... however that would be rather impractical.

Hard work paid off!

Teacher t-shirts ;)

To make everything easier on ourselves we stayed over at Nelsiwe’s house on the Tuesday evening to cook the food and get up early for the first trip on Wednesday! We were up at 6am to dish the food into take away boxes and then it was time for another naked basin wash, squatting in a large plastic tub of water in Nelsiwe’s bedroom... at least this water was hot as it had just been boiled in the kettle, which is more than can be said for the showers in hostel on a morning.
So we pack all of the kids into the hired kombi and head off to Hlane! Hlane is a small nature reserve when you compare it to the likes of Kruger (well, compared to the likes of anything as Swaziland itself is tiny!) but we saw Lions, giraffes, elephants, impala, kudu, nyala and even had our road blocked by a herd of white rhino. One Lion we actually saw lying with a dead impala, so we had obviously just missed a kill! Probably for the best really, some 4 year olds might have walked away slightly traumatised after seeing a Lion murder a small impala in front of their eyes.

Crocodile Class

HLANE 2013!

We also took them to Swazi Secrets where they process the oils from the marula nuts to make beauty products, unfortunately they weren’t doing any production while we were there, but the kids seemed to have fun pushing the crushing machines around and wearing marula lip balm.  

The second Injabulo trip was pretty much the same as the first; apart from the fact that Hlane was so busy with about 4 school trips we had to wait hours for our safari. In the mean time we took the kids down to the reception which was teeming with American tourists and we had them all singing and dancing! Yes, we actively paraded our cute preschoolers in front of tourists for entertainment, but it meant that they weren’t getting up to any mischief and the tourists now have lots of pictures and videos of our awesome kids to show people back home.

'Thishela' - teacher in SiSwati.

Ashley’s Birthday!

Friday 19^th sees Ashley joining the land of 19 year olds! To celebrate we had planned to have a joint preschool party for Ashley and Nelsiwe’s daughter Ciara; what we didn’t realise is that Nelsiwe’s plan was to have the party ‘after’ preschool hours, which she failed to tell us. So we muddled through the day with no other teachers and random people in party dresses and presents turning up around 12 o’clock. Failure in communication and Swazi Time... obviously the day was never going to go as planned. 

In the end it was really great fun and absolutely crazy! Nelsiwe had made enough food to feed all of the kids at preschool, all of her children (who stayed off school for the occasion) and all of the guests she invited. There was also a huge birthday cake for Ashley and Ciara, and after the cutting of the cake and making a wish Ciara nearly took off the face of one of the preschoolers as she started jumping up and down with the gigantic knife still clutched in her destructive little hand. This is the girl who can completely wreck my classroom with her bare hands in 10 minutes, rips up worksheets, chews on laminated resources and sucks on the blades of scissors... she should never ever be given anything weapon-like!

Little devil!

We head to soup kitchen with another huge cake that Ashley bought from Matata Spar to hand out, everyone’s eyes (especially Aunty Vinahs!) light up when they see the massive black forest gateaux and everyone gets a slice. 

Mmmm, licking the box clean.

When we arrive back to hostel the girls have a little birthday surprise for Ashley... they drag her outside armed with ketchup bottles, they absolutely COVER her in it before they take a bucket of cold water and dump it over her head. They then proceed to turn on the tap that is used to fill the pool and drench her past drenched! I’m so glad I was in Botswana on my birthday, these girls are merciless!

Ketchup attack

Water attack

Moriah Centre School Trips

With the small Moriah kombi that we drive we were only able to take one class per day... so that’s 4 classes, add that to our Injabulo trips and we would’ve been to Hlane 6 times in 2 weeks! No. We took opposite days for some light relief from driving around all the time.
On both days that Ashley went to Hlane she returned with photos of the watering hole with elephants, giraffes, hippo, rhino and basically everything else all together drinking in a really African scene. When I went there was either nothing at the watering hole, or a few rhinos. Looks like she had the luckier days!
However we did see a Lion and two Lionesses running through the grass towards our kombi, and when they slowed down the Lion basically brushed himself along the back of the kombi... safe to say I was pretty nervous in the driver’s seat!

Moriah Crocodile Class

Other developments at Hlane with Moriah Centre revealed that Aunty Sphiwe (the other teacher of my class) had the hots for Napoleon our safari guide! I could totally tell that they were flirting in SiSwati and then the next trip I went on she told us that we had to get his number for her... PULLED!

Things are crazy as ever here, but I’m going to miss it when it ends.

Kate xx

P.S. At soup kitchen this week Aunty Vinah’s Mum was wandering around with 3 kittens in a bag begging us to buy them for E5 each. That’s £1 for 3 kittens to you. Unfortunately we couldn’t as we have nowhere to keep them, and I was heartbroken leaving them there... but the great thing is we were talking about it at Sisekelo and one of the sports coaches decided he wanted to buy them!
So the next time we were at soup kitchen we bought 2 of the kittens (the 3^rd apparently disappeared or was eaten or something) and brought them back to hostel for him! They’re called Ashley and Kate. Score. 

N'AAAWWWWW <3

BOTSWANA! “I know it’s video.”

First things first, Botswana is a HUGE country yet it seems there’s not all that much there. Apart from the delta, amazing National Parks and the odd few largish towns the rest appears to be full of sand, donkeys and annoying compulsory road blocks. At these road blocks you have to open out all your possessions, be declared ‘meat free’ and then proceed to dip all of your shoes into a white chemical substance. Something about trying to prevent the spread of foot and mouth... but it’s a right pain in the arse. Plus they confiscated and orange off me, an orange, not very life threatening – they probably just get the munchies and abuse their position of power. :(

Anyway, after a tedious 7 hour journey on a public bus that stopped at every microscopic village and only had 40% of the seats actually attached to the chair frame we arrived in Shakawe. Shakawe is a small village one hour and a 10minute ferry ride away from the boys project, they met us there in a massive pickup truck with Ben the German (another volunteer at their project), and quite severe sunburn. Even though it had been nearly 5 months since we had last seen each other we picked up from exactly where we had left off, basically ripping each other about everything and I just knew that the next 5 days were going to be hilarious and brilliant.
After a hairy drive in the dark to Bana Ba Metsi we were greeted (or rather not greeted) by a group of nervous boys sat in the kitchen and then proceeded to meet Mr Peter Dow the boy’s host and shown to where we would be staying.

Ferry Ride

Unlike Ashley and I the boys live in their own little house; they cook, clean (or not) and braii by themselves and have a shower outside. It really is a lovely little place and you can feel the Project Trust presence from the years of writing on the walls and sticking up letters, messages and photos. Ben lives in a fancy tent set up on a house on stilts on the very edge of the school compound; you can sit on an elevated balcony and watch the sun set over the bush. Ben chivalrously gave up his beautiful home to us for the 5 days to go and sleep with the boys in their house and we had the place to ourselves, also equipped with an outside shower. I have to say, I love taking outside showers, you feel free... however, showering in the early mornings in the freezing cold with cold water isn’t ideal, so best to wait until midday! 

The Sam’s (and Ben) do a really great job on their project, they’re teaching at a primary school level to teenage boys around their own age and from sitting in on them teaching they have a really difficult job with it! Keeping the boys attention and motivating them to do work seems near impossible and they don’t get much appreciation in the classroom from their students. However watching them do manual with the boys is another story – in the afternoons they are split into groups and set physical tasks to do, mainly maintenance and improvement of the school and its facilities. They’re currently making urinals, and they’ve constructed a building complete with a traditional thatched roof, what they’re teaching the boys in invaluable, workmanship skills that will help them later in life and they are undoubtedly learning just as much in return.
They also do sports with the boys at the school; swimming, football, table tennis and volleyball – I sat and watched on a ‘swimming lesson’ and it seems to be 45 minutes of boys throwing each other into the pool and wrestling in the water, but they seem to have fun and that’s what it’s all about.

Bana Ba Metsi school is also well known in Botswana for its marimba band, they travel to Maun and Gaborone (the capital) to play concerts for people, and they really are fantastic. If you don’t know what marimba is imagine the colourful xylophones that we all had as children... okay, right, now image that it’s larger, made of wood and actually sounds nice. The boys come to the school and learn marimba from the other boys who are there, there’s to music to read, they just learn off one another and work by ear. They play typical African marimba tunes but can also play renditions of some chart favourites such as Waka Waka by Shakira and Whistle by Flo Rida!

Luckily I was at Bana Ba Metsi for my 19^th Birthday and even more luckily for me the 1^st May is some sort of African Independence day and is therefore a national holiday! That means so school, no teaching for the Sam’s and we get to go out on the delta on the schools boat!
It was the most insane birthday ever, we cruised along the Okavango waters for 4 hours or so with drinks on board, sunbathing on board, driving the boat, stopping off at a lodge along the river for more drinks and getting off to explore an island that the boys know. We spend a decent amount of time swimming in its pools while on constant lookout for hippos and crocodiles as they’re known to be in the area... Luckily we didn’t have any unfortunate run-ins with any dangerous animals while on the water however we did see a massive crocodile on the sand banks and stumbled upon a herd of 15 hippo up out of the water within the reeds! It was an incredible sight and we doubled back for more, unfortunately they had scarpered and the humongous bull hippo had slid into the water pretty close to our little boat... so then we scarpered!
We had a lovely lunch at the Dijo Deli, one of Shakawe’s best kept secrets off the beaten track and then hitchhiked back over from the ferry to Bana Ba Metsi.
Definitely one of my most awesome birthdays to date, and what an amazing place to have it! My 19^th will be forever unique. Making things even better Ashley and the boys had made me a birthday video which they showed me before we went out on the boat... hilarious and I will always have it as a reminder!

After another hellish public bus journey back from Shakawe to Maun we camped at the Old Bridge backpackers for 4 nights. Old Bridge has to be one of the most idyllic places that I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting, perched on the banks of the Okavango you can literally sit on a sofa less than 1 metre from the water or lie on a hammock half dangling over the water! I spent many glorious hours prostrate on that hammock, happily filling myself with copious amounts of salted peanuts and raisins while watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Everyone’s idea of perfect. 
Oh yes, I feel obliged to inform you of my very sudden and incredibly violent peanut addiction; I’m really not sure how it came about between travelling on buses and jumping off gorges but it has appeared. I can’t get enough of them; I’ve taken to destroying a 150g bag in less than 10 minutes which drives Ashley crazy because she hates peanuts and can’t stand the smell. I’m addicted, what can I do. They are simply delicious.

Most of our time in Maun was spent relaxing and putting off travelling to the next place; apart from one day when we went on another boat trip. Animal spectation wasn’t really the aim of this trip... rather it was alcohol, and sort of harassing locals. We were with a crazy guy we met at the backpackers who called himself ‘Captain Bob’, and we were now part of ‘Captain Bob’s Drunken Safaris’ where he sets off into the beautiful African landscape to get completely smashed and make mental videos. We had a wild time with Captain Bob and the rest of our crew! Ashley jumped ship to take control of a mekoro boat (dugout canoe) full of Motswanan children, we made a slight scene at a family gathering when Captain Bob decided to don a pair of bright red bikini bottoms he found in a bush and our boat driver got do drunk that he went arse over pecs and ended up half out of the boat, so Ashley and I drove to boat back to the lodge to ensure that no one died. No one died, we were brilliant. 

After leaving Maun we had a pit stop at the best hidden backpackers in the world (honestly didn’t think it even existed after our fruitless search with a pretty peeved off taxi driver) in Gaberone before heading to South Africa the next day.

Before I came to Africa my expectations of what it would look like are exactly like how Botswana looks; covered in sand, minimal vegetation and animals roam everywhere. Botswana has definitely got a donkey problem (I think I mentioned the donkeys already, oh well); I have never seen so many donkeys in my life.

What I have come to realise is that my initial impressions of Africa were incorrect; yes, Botswana is hot and covered in sand and wild animals but it is so far the only place I have visited that is like this. I’m sure other countries are similar (Namibia I’ve heard), but Africa also has its fair share of lush green areas! Prime example is Swaziland itself... we’re defiantly under informed about this continent in our Westernised countries! BBC, sort yourselves out and get over here, I’ve heard David Attenborough recently took the trip, so I hope all you British people at least have a better idea about what Africa is like!

Crack onto the internet and educate yourselves, Africa is a collaboration of literally every climate and landscape in the whole world, it’s awe-inspiring.

Kate xx 

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!  

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

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

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

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

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

Normally a bridge here, oh maaaaan.

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

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

Dung Beetle!

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

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

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

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

Loving life in Swaziland 2K12 ;)

Kate xx