My blogging style is normally one blog per week; but since
getting back we have been caught in a whirlwind of stress, long hours,
inconvenient journeys, ridiculous heat and so so so so so many children. There
are children literally coming out of my ears.
I do sincerely apologise to anyone who has been biting their nails down to the
quick in angst, just wondering where all my interesting posts are. (I doubt
there are many of you). As you will soon see I have barely had enough time to
shower and eat this past month, and the near future doesn’t look like it will
be bringing us any relief!
Our first week back was very uneventful; it basically
included sleeping, washing all our clothes (and my towel, it smelt DISGUSTING),
trying to keep cool (and failing) and taking lots of showers to try and rid
ourselves of the constant sweat. Well, the constant sweat was me; Ashley seems
immune to the heat whereas I am the equivalent of a snowman lost in the desert.
We spent one creepy night completely alone in the darkness of hostel due to an
insane storm causing a power cut; we didn’t get to eat anything as we couldn’t cook,
and Ashley walked around with a head torch on. She loved it.
The new student’s orientation was that weekend, which we had been told we had
to be back for. Turns out we didn’t have to do anything at all, and we had lost
a week’s travelling. However we did probably save an awful lot of money being
stuck back in hostel and not gallivanting around South Africa for another 7
days. The prefects decided to wake the ‘newbie’s’ up at 2:00am with vuvuzelas
which sent me straight back to the early morning horrors of Leadership Camp, at
least this time I could stay snuggled up in bed! Suckers.
Contact from the UK! Specifically Scotland.
On arriving back to Swaziland it was like the Highlands had come for a visit;
one of last year’s volunteers Hannah Craig sent us out a parcel for Christmas,
so we had cards to hand out to everyone and also some shortbread – which I was
particularly happy about! Ashley’s Aunty also sent out 3 tins of haggis for
everyone to try, so Ashley cooked up a nice little meal and we tucked into the
surprisingly delicious substance that is haggis.
Big thank you to the Scots out there! Your culture and culinary delicacies were
much appreciated.
Injabulo Preschool
We’ve also discovered the brilliant coming home surprise in the form of food
donations at Injabulo! The first 4 months that we were here we hadn’t been
receiving food donations of any sort; and normally the preschool received a
donation every month so we could feed the children at lunch time.
So for 4 months we had been angrily ringing around all of the local people with
the power, trying to source where our food was... Then out of the blue we
arrive at preschool to find our store room completely empty of our resources
(panic, we thought we had been robbed), and full of food. We hadn’t been robbed
by the way, only badly reorganised.
So now we can actually feed our children! Thank you WFP (World Food Programme).
FYI; Ashley and I have tried some of the food, its brown mush that tastes like
burning cigarettes... I think the caregivers might need a new pot.
 |
| Nelsiwe buzzing for the food! |
 |
| The food that tasted like smoke, yum. |
Last year we thought we had a lot on our plate with 60
children... but after our Registration Day turned into “Registration Week - pop
by whenever you like and we’ll probably let your kid in because you’re in a bad
situation and we can’t turn you away/your kid is really cute” fiasco; we have
now managed to land ourselves with 76 registered children. Flip-my-life.
Luckily one of the parents who was registering a child wants to help out with
teaching at Injabulo; the idea is she will volunteer for a while and not have
to pay school fees, then she can receive a share of the money like Nelsiwe
does. This makes our lives the tiniest bit easier because we have another body
to help out... It also makes Nelsiwe’s life a whole lot easier on the days that
she’s alone with all those crazy children!
 |
| This isn't even one full class... |
Nelsiwe also said to Ashley and I that “when you are not
here it’s like I am walking alone through a desert with no shelter, but when
you are here it’s like there is a big biggg shelter over me and I know that
everything is alright” – what a cutie.
Everything started out pretty peachy at Injabulo this year,
yes there were a lot of children but they were kind of behaving themselves...
Until this week.
Ashley and I arrived early to Injabulo to find the store room COMPLETELY
ransacked, it looked like we had been robbed by a heard of blind elephants. We
had a bit of a rant and a rave, complained about the state of the place and
decided that we would have a meeting with Nelsiwe about the mess. Then we
knuckled down and tidied it up, for an hour. Later on that morning when we were
sorting out payment with Nelsiwe and Bongkile (the parent volunteer) we left to
classroom to find the kids had gone into the store room; they pulled EVERYTHING
out from where we had tidied it away to, strewn books all over the bloody
village and decided that puzzles work better when the pieces are buried in
dirt. It was worse than before.
As you can probably tell, we were not happy. At all. Ashley had a bit of a
screaming fit and shouted at all the kids to go home, we screamed on about
never going into the store room, respecting toys and not throwing books. I
walked into the trashed store room, stood alone and took a breather; I was so
furious I was about to punch a wall, and with there being so many children
about the place one of them was bound to run in the way and would end up with a
black eye or something... Plus Ingrid (our Desk Officer and Director of Project
Trust!) is coming out to visit us in 4 days, so it would be rather bad on me if
I looked like a child abuser, might just get repatriated for that.
Moriah Centre
Moriah Centre has also increased in numbers this year! It’s
about time too; the preschool has 7 teachers and there are only 4 classes, last
year the largest class had 10 pupils in – when you compare those statistics to
Injabulo you can really understand just how much we have to battle to complete
the easiest things. So now there are 4 classes with 15 students in each, still
easy as pie to manage and now more children can come to preschool!
Since coming back Ashley and I are the designated kombi drivers
for Moriah Centre; we drive the kombi that has been donated by the American
Missionaries, so that should mean we have lovely, calm stress-free mornings
because we drive (rather than walk to) Moriah, right? Wrong.
It is currently summer in Swaziland, and also the rainy season. For the past
month it has been chucking it down almost every night, and there’s been a fair
few thunderstorms with tornado like winds, supreme lightning and annoying power
shortages. Therefore all 3 dams in the country are flooded, and all the rivers
are high, which means that no one can cross the bridge from the village ‘Game
5’ to our area of Big Bend. Every morning we have been leaving before 7am to
walk 20 minutes to Ubombo Primary School (UPS) to collect the kombi, then we drive
to Game 5 pack 5 teachers and about 30 kids into the kombi and drive them to
preschool with our fingers crossed, hoping that the police doing traffic checks
don’t look too closely into our windows.
We then drive them all back after preschool, and walk back from UPS in the
blazing heat. Even the days we’re at Injabulo we’ve been doing the Game 5 run,
so in between running Moriah people around we have been getting on 2 public
kombis to Injabulo in the middle of nowhere, teaching, waiting (sometimes for 2
hours) for kombis back, taking everyone home, walking back from UPS and then
cooking for soup kitchen. Hectic. ‘Working 9 ‘till 5’, I wish... try 7 ‘till
6. And that’s not including paperwork.
Swaziland, please stop raining and let everyone walk across
the bridge. Thank you.
However, we have had some pretty funny times since
returning;
- We missed the very first day that all the kids
came back because we were at Injabulo, but Mary (one of the teachers) told us
that “yesterday was like a funeral, all the kids were crying like someone had
died!”
- Cecelia one of the cooks decided that she was
going to bash the curtains in the church hall while we were doing singing and
dancing with the children... This unleashed a plague of horrible black insects
that look like evil grasshoppers, they jump in all directions like tiny reflex
balls on steroids and for some reason have appeared in our lives in their
thousands since coming back. Summer must be their breeding season. :( The kids were running around and screaming while I was squashing anything that
came near me; meanwhile Cecelia and Gugu were calmly using brooms to herd up
the insects into enormous black writhing masses in the corners of the room
before disposing of them with an industrial hoover. I am not exaggerating,
there were literally thousands of them.
- Ashley finds a dead snake.
- Nonhlanhla and Khanyisile (two more teachers)
beat down a tiny bird that was flying around the church hall with some flags...
They were charging around like nutcases, wielding these flags for about 10
minutes, they nearly smashed through the windows and brought down the ceiling
fans! They didn’t kill it as Ashley and I originally thought; only traumatised
it enough so that it lay still while they were walking around with it
pretending to eat it, and telling everyone not to free it because they were
saving it for lunch. “No, not dead, just tired. It’s meat, for the fire, for BRAII! It’s nice.”“Where is it, I want my lunch. I want to eat it, want my lunch.” Ashley and I freed it, that’s where it went. To be honest, I think she was
kidding about having it for a braii that day. But I don’t doubt that she
probably has killed and eaten birds on other days.
 |
| Florence getting in on the action! |
 |
| Nonhlanhla with her lunch. |
 |
| Freeing the bird from its fate. |
 |
| My re-enactment of how they were chasing the bird around - this is much tamer actually! But similar things went on for a good 5 minutes. |
Soup Kitchen
You will all remember the money we raised before Christmas
to buy shoes for the kids at soup kitchen, and to buy presents for our
preschoolers... Anyway, we had a fair bit of that money left over, so we
decided to buy every child at soup kitchen a lunchbox and water bottle – this
way they all have a container to bring with them for the food, we don’t have to
serve them 2nds into their bare hands and they can take clean water home with
them! A pretty sound investment if you ask me.
 |
| New boxes! |
We also hand out loads of rejected clothes from girl’s hostel, they all leave
stuff behind when they go home for the Christmas holidays and we ended up
getting most of it! Amongst this large collection of clothes was a swimming
costume, maybe a woman’s size 12... and Aunty Vina claimed it for herself. Now
you have seen pictures of Aunty Vina and she is not a small lady. But she was
incessant “For meee! For Durbaan!” So she’s going to be hitting the Durban
beaches in a pretty tight black one-piece, you work it Vina!
 |
| For DURBAAAAAAN, hahahahahahaaa :D |
We’ve seen Aunty Vina have quite a few freak outs in the
last month; the first was over her maize crops.
A sponsor gave her maize seeds to plant in a field so she can grow it to
feed the orphans who live with her; apparently a patch in the middle of the
field has been stolen and she went mental at all the kids one time we were
there! She thinks that either they stole the maize, or their families, or
someone that they know... Thing is it could’ve been anyone, but they all got an
earful, bless.
The second freak out was directed at one girl from soup kitchen; she accused
Aunty Vina of keeping soup kitchen food to herself. One Friday we didn’t have
transport so we couldn’t go to soup kitchen, therefore the kids were expecting
twice as much food the next time, but there wasn’t because we had forgotten to
defrost it. One of the older girls turned around to Aunty Vina and (I assume)
accused her in front of everyone of keeping the food – which she didn’t do
because we just hadn’t brought it. Safe to say Aunty Vina wasn’t best pleased at
the accusations and she verbally tore a strip off this girl. I can’t say I’m
not surprised, she comes under a lot of scrutiny from certain jealous people in
the community, and if gossip starts (whether it be false or true) things could
get difficult for her.
We have also been introduced to the Swazi drink ‘Buganu’ by
Aunty Vina, which is a beer made from the marula fruit. Marula fruit trees are
very common in Swaziland, and the marula season begins each year in mid
Feburary – May. Everyone is Swaziland has a massive celebration of the marula
fruit, and every year the Kings holds an annual Marula Festival where different
families present the Royal family with some of their home brewed Buganu. Then
everyone gets drunk as hell.
It’s a cloudy white substance and basically tastes like very strong beer, it’s about 8.7% and I can’t say I’m a massive
fan. But it’s traditional and I can say I’ve tried it, so that’s good enough!
Everyone who drinks it gets absolutely steaming, and apparently it brings out
an uncontrollable
urge to eat meat, and livestock thefts increase significantly during marula
season... Interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tlF3kGbT4 - hit this link and you won't regret it!
Hostel
Aunty Rose has been an absolute STAR since we got back from
South Africa, her banter has excelled over the Christmas holidays and she
genuinely makes me wet myself at least 3 spectacular times in a week. You have
no idea about this woman, really, check out my ‘Aunty Rose’ post as there are a
few more gems on there!
THE STORY OF THE BLACK MAMBA – one day at hostel Ashley and
I headed down to the staff room at school, only to find all of the teachers gathered
outside the computer room. We had no idea what all the excitement was about so
we decided to investigate. Turns out that the IT teacher had been sat working
and not realised that there had been a black mamba snake coiled up on the
computer table next to him! Mambas are deadly venomous and a black mamba bite
would leave you dead within 2 minutes; don’t even try getting to a hospital, you
might as well just lay down and think about all the lovely things that have
happened in your life.
Anyway, we went inside the computer room to have a look at the snake because
since being in Africa we haven’t come across one, even though they are all
over! After feeling a bit tense in the room we left to allow the security
guards to dispose of the mamba. They came in wielding a double barrelled
shotgun and a large plank of wood. There was some discussion over whether they
should turn off the electricity and shoot it (not a great plan as they would
have destroyed some computers), or wait until it slithered into an open space
and shoot it. Neither of these plans happened. In the end they took the plank
of wood and beat it to death. It was quite exciting.
Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Kathy and Richard’s New
House
After a hectic week on project we decided to get away for
the weekend; we caught a public kombi to Manzini and were treated to a
restaurant dinner by Kathy and Richard at a rather fancy Portuguese place. We
were then taken to their new house, which is MASSIVE and overlooks the hills
and countryside of Manzini. There are 3 large bedrooms for the two of them, a
swimming pool, two verandas and you could have a game of five aside football in
their lounge.
The next day we moved onto our backpackers ‘Sondzelas’ which is inside Mlilwane
Wildlife Sanctuary, we walked down an unmarked dirt track for 5km in the
blazing midday heat with no idea where we were going. Finally we arrived and
headed down to main camp that night for a spot of Swazi Dancing!
 |
| This track was ENDLESS. We walked right into the horizon of this photo I swear, and even further. |
Sunday morning we went for a walk in the sanctuary, we headed over to the lake
and walked the ‘Hippo Trail’, unfortunately we didn’t see any hippos but we did
see our first zebras! We also had our lunch kindly paid for by a group of
people who were HASH-ing in the sanctuary. Allow me to explain... Rich people
from Swaziland and Mozambique had met each other at the sanctuary to do what
they enjoy the most, drinking and running. We were talking to 3 people from the
HASH group for a few hours in the restaurant and they offered to pay for our
food and drinks, score! We also caught a lift back to Manzini with one of them
in return for helping out with a weekly food shop... great deal.
 |
| Oh hi Zebra. |
 |
| Finished walking the Hippo Trail |
 |
| Braving the animals, trooper. |
It has been a stressful few weeks back, but now we’re
starting to get back into the swing of things. Ingrid is coming out for a visit
this coming week, so we’ll have some pressure on us! Nah, just kidding, we’ll cruise
it, Swazi vols are the best vols after all. ;)
Kate xx
