(origineel bericht op be-more.nl)
Week number 6 (already!)
Lovely people,
Last week we had a warm welcome to the new volunteer. For two days after she arrived we had no hot water, and the electricity was kind of failing too. First time, the lights went out when we were eating dinner in the mall were we do grocery shopping every Monday and Thursday (galleria). Twice in a row the whole mall went black for a couple of seconds but fortunately the lights came on again too. Then when we got ‘home’ we found out that we had no electricity on the whole premises. So we had to walk around with our flashlights and sit in our little house with candles burning while we were, well, doing nothing, really. When we were all settled in our beds, nice and warm, the lights suddenly turned on, so that we had to get out of bed and walk through the cold to the main house to turn off the lights. The next day (we still had no hot water, means we all hadn’t showered for about 2 days…ieuw) there was another black-out right when me and Caroline were cooking dinner for Nathalie and Sophie, who were downstairs cause they had to sleep with the babies. Fortunately we were almost finished cooking and, besides the fact that the vegetables were still kind of frozen, made a pretty eatable meal, considering the circumstances. I guess it’s just something you have to experience during your stay in South-Africa…We were just lucky that the power outages were for only a couple of hours at the most, and didn’t last for days!
Besides those little problems the normal week planning continued. I had to teach P. and T. in homeschooling this week. This mainly means rubbing out used schoolbooks and taping over the answers so that they are unreadable, while T. and P. are working by themselves. The schoolbooks they use are donated from a school, so that’s why we have to rub out the answers another kid penciled in there. Once in a while they ask you a question because they don’t understand what they have to do, or how to do something, but that’s very rare and sometimes you have to check some exercises for them so they can continue with the next. During Arts & crafts I asked P. to make a blue and grey medium sized elephant for me, which he actually didn’t finish within the week. So he continued making it this week. Yesterday, I was in the daycare, and P. came to me and with a proud smile gave me the elephant that he made for me. It was beautiful and amazing to see how proud he was that he could make that for me!
Anyways, last week Tuesday it was A.’s birthday, so on Thursday we took him out to the galleria to do some birthday shopping. Whenever it’s a kids birthday they get 100 rand from Ros and the volunteers take them to the galleria to buy something, and afterwards take them out to dinner at a place of their choice. Our friend was turning 17 years old, and I was told that decision making was not his strong suit, so I was prepared for walking around the galleria and going into store after store. The opposite happened, we walked into the first store and voila, he choose his ‘birthday present’ in less than 10 minutes! So to kill some time we went to this sort of arcade in the mall and he played some games, which was fun. After that we went out to dinner and somehow we all ended up ordering the same thing, chicken and ribs. This meant that at the end of our dinner we were all covered in sauce and meat, cause it was so delicious!
Friday I left to go to the Drakensbergen. We drove up to this nice little backpackers at the beginning of the Sani pass were I met the most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen (I wanted to take him with me!). And the next day we (group of 7, 8 including the guide) went up the Sani pass, squeezed in a little 4x4 jeep car thing, onto Lesotho were we would spent the night. It was actually freezing cold and there was a very very strong wind blowing, so we were actually all very content that we were inside a car. On our way up however we had the unfortunate luck that our car decided to break down in the middle of one of those hairpin curves. So there we were, stuck in the middle of a curve, in the freezing cold, with a car that wouldn’t start. So our guide decided to back-up to get out of the curve and out of the way of other cars that wanted to pass. But by doing so she (yes, yes, woman and driving, I KNOW!) nearly crashed us into the mountain side. The car was literally 2 inches away from hitting the rocks. Anyways, some other dude turned up to pull our car up a little bit so after that we were actually able to back-up and turn the car around. Then while our guide was waiting for a new car to arrive we were driven up the mountain to the highest pub in Africa to wait for her to pick us up again with the new car so that we could continue. This little adventure made us stone cold and we lost about 2 hours…Anyways, around 4 or 5 we arrived with the family we were going to stay with in Lesotho. They were such lovely people. In the evening they danced and sang for us around a campfire. They actually have no electricity and running hot water there so we ate our dinner in the dark that night. Also, we had to pee on a long-drop toilet, which is basically a hole in the ground with a toilet seat on top of it…Very awesome that was, and it stank like crazy! On Sunday our group had decided to go horseback riding through the Drakensberg mountains. Well, it was about 15 years ago that I last sat on a horse, and to be honest I’ve always been a little afraid of horses. So, I was a little tiny bit nervous before we went…Understandable right? Fortunately I got a horse that was not too big (actually it was more like a pony, haha) and once on the animal for a couple of minutes, just standing still, I felt quite secure and ready to ride. Of course I got the horse that was kicking an biting other horses in the butt so I had to stay in last position otherwise my cute pony would kick other horses…Besides that it was beautiful to ride through these mountains, the views were breathtaking. Also, I really felt proud that I was able to control my pony and let it stop whenever I wanted and steer it around, not bad for a first timer I would say ;)! To be fair, these pony’s just followed each other wherever, so I didn’t have to steer of stop much, but still I felt pretty cool. The next day I was a little bit sore from sitting on that horse, but o well who cares…On the way back to the backpackers it started snowing a little bit, but fortunately we did not get stuck with our 4x4 again!
It is actually getting pretty cold here in the mornings and the nights, which I kind of did not expect…even though it’s wintertime over here…I guess Africa is just supposed to be warm when I think of it.
Last night me and Caroline went to sleep with the babies. You have to start at around 4 pm by putting the babies in bath, super cute, and then you have to feed them and give them a bottle and put them to sleep. But one of the babies has the flu or something in that direction so at around 1.30 he started to scream and wouldn’t go back to sleep anymore, so after 20 tries to get him to sleep in his own bed we finally took him in our bed to sleep with us. And even there he was still crying from time to time, it was really sad, and I hope he gets better soon. All the other babies did sleep all through the night, so that was actually nice!
With love from South-Africa,
Marlies.