Swaziland Volunteering

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  Swaziland, Swaziland
Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Hello all!

  The volunteering wasn't all we thought it would be. When we booked, it was advertised as two weeks in an orphange, working and playing with the kids. When we had our presentation for the volunteering part of the trip, we were slightly surprised to find that we would be on a building (yes, that's right, construction) project for the first week and then in an NCP for the second with the kids. We gave it the benefit of the doubt.
   Manual labour is not for us! We were making mud bricks with an ancient machine, but as there was about 10 of us and only one machine, the rest of us were digging the earth up to make the bricks. Hard work in Africa heat! When they realised there was far too many of us and too little work that set us to knock down a run down house on the site, transfer the bricks to a pile and smash them up - sounds simple enough but it took us all week (bare in mind we only worked the mornings) and the torrential rain everynow and then due to the rainy season made it slightly more dangerous with the slip factor!
  We were building a house for a family that live on this site whose current house has gigantic holes in it and is basically slowly collapsing. The kids were there everyday distracting us - some of us wanted to be distracted! Little cutie pies!
  We would go back to the lodge every afternoon covered in red mud and dust and in desperate need of a shower!
  The second week was much cleaner! We were based at the Lobamba NCP which is a school that teaches kids whose parents can't afford to pay for them to attend a proper school. They have about 70 kids there but it varies depending on which ones turn up, especially when it rains. They were rehearsing their nativity play and we helped them make their costumes - angels, stars, Mary and Joseph - they were all really excited about it. Their ages range from as young as 3 to 16 so it was a bit of a nightmare to begin the play but luckily the drama teacher who comes in is really good and the kids love her.
   During these two weeks we had most afternoons and weekends free - we went quad biking in the more rural parts of Swaziland (which is about the size of Wales), had tea in homesteds in the hills, drove through a river, and bought some crystal picked directly out the mountains by a teenage girl for R5 (pennies!). Another weekend we went on a cultural weekend up in the mountains  - we slept in a beehive hut, had a traditional Swazi meal which we ate with our right hand, went to a Zion church (rather scary!) and generally saw rural Swaziland. Very cultural! We felt like we had really seen what Swaziland was like by the end of that weekend.

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The building crew!

Lobamba Kids

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