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Published: January 25th 2009
Our Room
Me writing a letter to Na :) and a small part of my photo wall!Hey again Team England! How are we all?
Ignore the top bit if it's saying I'm somewhere random in Kwazulu-Natal, I'm in Ingwavuma and it doesn't show up on this stupid blog. It's up near the Mozambique and Swaziland borders if you want to find it on a map!
I'm trying to upload some pictures to my last post as well as this one so check that out - though I may not get them all done as internet connections here are SO slow.
So...
Driving up here on Thursday was amazing. I was expecting it to be really boring as it was like an eight to twelve hour drive - but it was awesome. I just looked out of the window the whole way! Everything I could see was just how I imagined the real Africa to be. Cascading mountains, beautiful greenery, school children walking on dusty roads, rondavels and shacks with happy washer-women smiling outside, people carrying things on their heads - it was so great.
Just a few funny things we saw:
* A woman with an umbrella just sitting on a traffic island, while her tiny child (maybe 2 at the
Mosquito Net
Sami in hers; I love them because they make me feel like a princess! most) played with a broken sign right next to the road! He'd obviously been trained to stay on the island...and he had a giant pink monkey toy on his back that was bigger than him.
* A rock with "2PAC" carved into it, and the brand name 'Vodacom' written in the dirt lke an advert.
* Goats, cows and dogs, all wild, just randomly wandering in the road.
* A man selling fizzy drinks and newspapers through car windows during a traffic jam.
* A woman and 3 young girls selling bananas on plates through the windows as we stopped at traffic lights.
* Roadworks use red flags instead of traffic lights.
* A woman carrying a 'Spar' bag on her head while she held her two children's hands, who were both carrying mini potato sacks on theirs.
It was fascinating.
For the first six hours or so (probbaly more as a road was closed and we had to take a massive detour) we had gotten used to travelling in comfort. Lynne (the Lattitude lady) and her husband were driving us and they had hired an eight seater - and it was
only me, Samy, Alvaro and Helen so we had like two seats each. This was a big change when we met the woman from Kosi Bay who had to fit all four of us plus all our luggage into her tiny three seats at the back! It was quite a squeeze - especially in boiling hot weather and for another hours journey! Oh, and typicaly it was the bumpiest road in the WORLD. It's always so reassuring that South Africa has terrible traffic and NO-ONE here has seatbelts in the back seats of their cars...
Finally after what seemed like forever we were dropped off in a town called Bhambanana. We said goodbye to Alvaro and Helen who were off to Kosi Bay and met Bongwie and Sebo who were going to take us up the hill to Ingwavuma. Bongwie is the current acting principal for Nansindlela. I loved being in the car with them - the views were getting more and more beautiful as we went up the hill and she had proper African gospel music playing over the radio. They're both Zulus and so so friendly.
In South Africa they call traffic lights 'robots' (it makes
Our Mess
This is what you get when you can't use the wardrobe! me feel happy!) and as we were driving up when a bunch of cows just stopped in the road in front of us Bongwie said "these are the only robots we have in these parts" - it really made me smile!
We then arrived at the teacher's compound and met everyone we would be living with. There are four houses, two are single ones with one family in each, and the other two are communal. We live in the middle communal house. When we arrived Bongwie knocked on everyone's doors and forced them to come out and meet us - even though one man was asleep! They're very big on politeness here :P.
The other people in our house are called Minky, Walter and Abel and are all teachers at the school. In the other two houses on our garden are Bongwie, and in the other Ruth, Simon, Zoe (their 6 month old) and Douglas (their cat). We were invited to Ruth and Simon's for supper at seven.
Ingwavuma is BEAUTIFUL but tiny and the statistics here are quite sad. One in three people here have HIV and there are very bad cases of TB. There's a
The Kitchen
Talk about real Africa eh! hospital here which is the reason it became a 'town' in the first place - it was built because malaria can only survive up to 500m above sea level and we are 750m above it. It's so sad though - apparently a LOT of kids at the school suffer from AIDS and/or TB (which has mutated up here so some cases can be fatal). There's also a post office, a Spar, a market, a police station and a couple of other random shops, but that's about it.
The Teacher's Compound looks pretty from the outside - the garden is gorgeous. But seeing the inside of the building was quite a shock!
* The kitchen is delapidated and dirty, and there are bars across the door.
* The bathroom looks like something from prison, and the light doesn't work.
* Our room is TINY. We have two single beds with really thin mattresses and a sheet on each, a shelf unit and a wardrobe. There are blankets in the wardrobe but when we opened it we shut it again immediately because it was infested with cockroaches! We keep it shut at all times and spray it regularly
The Bathroom
Imagine it at night, with no water, no light, and LOTS of bugs :P now - but cockroaches still flit about and we still find them all over the place!
* There is no water here at all and hasn't been for six months so we have to fetch water from the rain tanks, and when that runs out from the pump down the hill. You can drink the rain water but it miht have the cholera virus and it has mosquito larvae in it! We drunk it the first night but now we're boiling it and bottling it, and we're hopefully investing in a water filter next week.
* They don't always have electricity - it often will just go out for days or switches will trip.
Samy and I were a bit depressed when we arrived as you mght imagine. It was just a bit of a shock to the system and when we were sticking our photos up we were both crying and wanted to go home. Going to Ruth and Si's cheered us up a lot though - they're white south africans and REALLY nice. Thier house is a LOT nicer than ours!
There's a rule here you have to taste, if not eat, everything you
Our Little Friend
Niiiiiiiiiiiiice. are offered. They cooked us dinner, and it looked really interesting and lovely but we couldn't stand it! We put our brave faces on though and ate everything. There was mint leaf water, lasagne which was lovely (until we found out that all the meat here was dodgy so it might make us sick as we're not used to it), eggplant with tomato and either cheese or egg inside (i couldn't tell but it looked like popcorn) - this was actually OK, and a fruit called a Gems Squash that looked like dental floss mixed with banana inside a melon skin! You had to eat it with butter and this freaked me out with my sweet and savoury issue. :P
They were a lovely couple to chat to, but during the meal they told us lots of scary things. Apparently you get some really dangerous snakes and spiders here - like the Black Widow and the Black Mambo!
We watched a DVD with them of Ingwavuma photos and it does look like an amazing place - I think we just need some time to get used to how basic it is! We were hoping the school would make
it worthwhile (and it did!)
The next morning we got a lift to school with Bongwie. The school is beautiful! Honestly I LOVED it, all the kids were satring at us because we were new and white, but Bongwie had such a great repor with them. Their school uniform is blue shirt and trousers for boys and blue skirt, shirt and long socks for the boys. They're very strict too as a girl had her hair down as we walked up and Bongwie shouted at her.
They don't have a staff room and the closest thing is a Teachers Office - a tiny room with 3 computers and a photocopier. We went there to meet everyone (I will never remember everyone's names - Zulu names are very difficult!). My favourite lady was called Mrs Seguiza, but she told us just to call her Mama. She lives in the other communal house and when we met her she pulled us into a big hug and called us her babies 😊.
We teach computers 3 times a week to grade 7,8 and 9, and cover any lessons when teachers are away or need extra help. The only problem is
B-E-A-UTIFUL!
The view from that rock! the computers hardly ever work, and there are only ten when class sizes can be more than 40! We'll work something out.
There's a staff meeting every morning which ends in a prayer, and then 3 classes followed by morning break (half an hour), 3 more then lunch (half an hour) then 2 more. It is 7:45 until 2:25.
It turned out our first computer lesson was gonna start in 20 minutes with grade 7...and we had no plan! We ruched something together but it was hopeless, the kids are pretty rowdy and there were 40 plus. The computers weren't up yet so we jus tried to talk to them about England and Australia - but it was hard work! Computer lessons have to be held in the library untill the new block is built, and the library is very small. The kids all sit on the floor and there's barely room for us to move! The librarian has a condition so he is only about hip height, he's nice but can be grumpy and is VERY slack and not at all helpful! When we ran out of things to do I just improvised and taught them the Moose Song! It was very successful but the librarian was not happy!
We ran two other lessons of life orientation that we were covering for Bongwie while she was in a meeting. I really enjoyed them because we were given a plan, we had more time to think about them and the kids seemed really engaged with what we were saying! On Monday we have to cover all of Simon's classes as well as run computers, so we will have to start splitting up for lessons.
At lunch we went to watch the littlun's, preschool age. They only speak Zulu if they speak at all - but they are so cute! We pushed them on the swings and counted with them - it's weird though, they don't have toys so they seem perfectly content playing with broken furniture and poles and planks of wood. It's kind of sad, and English heath and safety would go crazy! There are lots of different kinds of soecial Zulu handshakes here, and all the littluns did one with me before they went back to class - it was so cute!
Loads of girls in the upper schools and metric have kids, a lot of which are also now at the school.
As we walked home from school everyone was greeting us! If yu speak to someone here it's rude not to ask how they are first, and we were being asked by everyone, random strangers,children, old people - it was great!
As it turns out there is not a lot to do at weekends. You really have to look and make your own fun. We started off catching crickets and in the end went to visit Bongwie (who was eating a boiled chicken's foot - a delicacy here as well as beak!) and then Ruth and Simon.
Simon took us to a bunch of places to cure our boredom, including the palace of the king of the Zulus, and the dam. Zulu's have a king of each area, and they are allowed as many wives as they can take care of. The one here has 11 wives and therefore 11 palaces (they are not impressive buildings!). We also went to a rock that if you stood on it and looked at the view you could see a lot of Kwazulu-Natal and almost all of it's neighbouring country Swaziland - it was beautiful!
At the dam we spoke to a one-legged man with a puppy. He was so nice and friendly and it just shows you how the people here are not affected by the poverty of their families and backgrounds. It's nice but kind of heartbreaking, I wish there was more I could do to help.
There are tons of dogs around that I assumed were all wild, but Simon says a lot of them belong to people but are so badly abused they run away 😞.
In the evening Ruth and Si helped us out again with boredom-curing, and we went round there to play some games! Last night was Yatsi and Cranium, next time Scrabble and Settlers of Catan! (Na and Pete I know you'll both be impressed :P).
This morning we tried to do our washing - we had to fill up 25litre jugs of water from the raintank to fill the washer and lug it to the shed the other side of the garden - and it needed 90 litres! AND after all that the power cut out so we had to do it all by hand anyway. Boo! Tell you what, I'm gonna be muscle woman by the time I've finished here!
I'm at Ruth's now as it's the only place we can get the net, and we're house sitting and looking after Douglas a theyve gone to Richards Bay.
I can't think of any more news except I've been bitten to death and have so far pretty much avoided sunburn! We like our living arrangements a lot more now - the people make it to be honest. All in all I'm very happy but I do miss people, home, and it's comforts a lot!
We're off to cook apricot chicken now 😊 (see I'm branching out!) so I'll catch you all later!
Lots and lots of love, miss you all very very much.
Linda xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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mum
non-member comment
Really interesting - almost felt I was there with you. Pictures are great. APRICOT CHICKEN! (And did you EAT it or just cook it??)xxxx