Oh Africaa

Victoria Falls!!

Last Friday we went on a 4 day trip to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and it was quite easily one of the top 10 of most amazing weekends in my life (most of which are yet to come). I was told years ago that it was an amazing place to see so there’s no way I could come to this part of the world and not make that extra few hours journey to see it. There’s a thing about Zimbabwe that separates people in opinion here, we even had some locals from Botswana telling us we had to be careful going to Zimbabwe. Personally, I like to keep an open mind but the media I have seen back home has represented the Zimbabwe/South Africa border as a pretty dangerous place with Zimbabweans trying to escape their country and what not so I’ll admit crossing the Botswana/Zimbabwe border by foot as we did wasn’t the one of the least anxious moments of my life but it needed not be as it was safe and easy.

Saturday morning we headed to the falls and WOW. Did I mention it was one of the 7 natural wonders of the world? I could have walked around the falls forever, In fact I could have just pitched a tent on the edge and lived there. Easily. It was just amazing, there where cute little monkeys running around and we could see elephants on the Zambian side of the waterfalls. It took us about 3 hours to walk around the entire waterfall including an extended pit stop at the ‘danger point’ which is quite literally a dangerous point with no barrier to stop you falling 107m to your death. Me and one of the other volunteers thought nothing of hanging off of the edge and looking over…which is obviously not a common thing as people we looking and taking pictures of us like we were nuts, but then I guess we probably were. And as high on life as I could have been, I went straight on an elephant back safari. Activities at the falls are expensive, which was the only downside because there’s so much to do from bungee jumps to helicopter rides etc etc. But I decided to go for the one thing that I’d be least likely to get the opportunity to do again and that’s ride an African elephant! I got a female elephant and I got told her name which I forgot almost immediately….and then up I was on this platform ready to hop onto this elephants back. So surreal. But it was so amazing….and although this is stating the obvious but elephants are really really tall, I was amazed at how far I was from the ground. I did say it was obvious. Oh and my elephant farted a total of 3 times and the 3rd one was an absolute killer, I only just about survived. On the elephant back safari we saw other elephants (hardly surprising), a load of warthogs, a minimum of about 200 crocodiles and I can’t remember what else….Ever touched an elephants trunk before? Its weird…the skin is so rough and they have like an equivalent to nose hairs which are these little black thin spikey things. That’s really the best I can describe it. But anyway after we got off the elephants we fed them for a while and then they were told to salute us which these very well trained elephants did perfectly and it reminded me so much of the bit with the elephants in The Jungle Book.

My second and third place star purchases of the weekend were pair of portable African drums and a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note :D

Let There Be Water!

It’s taken over 2 months but finally we have running water in our house! The realisation that there was water in toilet system when I woke up the other morning was definitely as excited as I could be at 6.30am. I mentioned before that the two hardest things about lack of running water are toilet flushing and toothbrush rinsing so the sound of the toilet flushing the other morning was music to my ears. I’m surprised that I even remember how to use a tap because the ones in our house have been up to this point absolutely useless, the flow takes a while to get going but who cares we have water! Hooray!

Two months has well and truly passed and now we have under a month until we go home. When it comes to work it’s sad because at this point, you begin to work down with everything…putting deadlines on projects and what not. And I already can’t help but think about how sad it will be to say bye to some people. I’ve realised in recent weeks that definitely I’m a better volunteer when I work with younger people. I’m still volunteering at the baby orphanage which I love, I get so excited to see them every time. And its weird how close you get to them so quickly especially when you get to know their little personalities individually. Two of the boys’ adoption is being finalised this week, and as amazing as it is that they’ve been adopted out, It’ll be sad to see them go. One of them is at that cute age where he’s learning to talk and as he can talk more than the others, he’s always telling them what to do like he’ll go up to the babies and tell them to stop crying and expects them to listen. Bless! And the other is disabled, he’s blind and has a growth problem, but every time he senses you standing over him or sitting next to him he smiles and giggles at you. So adorable! There’s another little boy of about 9 months who is probably the happiest baby I’ve ever met. Always laughing and smiling for no reason but every time he’s withing reaching distance he’ll always try to eat my toes, strange child….and another little girl of 2, who after turning her into a human aeroplane one time, is constantly around my legs with her arms up shouting ‘I want up, I want up’. I really wish I could just bring them all home with me. And I mentioned Hope Mission in one of my last blogs, which is a shelter for homeless, out of school teenage girls from difficult backgrounds, we’ve been going there often over the past few weeks and I love it just as much! The girls are all so lovely and they love having us there, the 1st time we went we just had a mini slumber party to get to know them, sweets, crisps, chit chat, friendship bracelets and Beyonce on in the background, went down a treat. The coming weeks I plan to do some self-esteem building sessions with them and hopefully leave having inspired them in some way. If I can say one thing to just one of the girls that makes her think about staying in school and moving forward positively with her life, and sticks with her after I’ve left, then I will leave here one very happy lady :)

Only In Africa

One thing I love about here is there are certain things you can do here that you just can’t do at home. A couple weekends ago for example we went camping in the desert. Exactly my point. And to get there we travelled about 7km to the entry of this campsite, sat on the ground on the side of a motorway and then we got tents, mattresses, camping chairs, water and whatever else we needed from this complete stranger (well she was a stranger to me, but one of the other volunteers and met her previously), who then also gave us a lift a good few miles away from the road and civilisation altogether, to this deserted campsite in the middle of complete nowhere. Where else can you do that? If I was sat on the side of a motorway at home, I’d probably be either arrested or sectioned. Camping itself was amazing. There’s something nice about being in the middle of nowhere, with no contact to anybody whatsoever. Even the fact that we saw about 30 odd Zebras about 10 or so minutes drive away and a fair few ostriches even closer, and then the fact that we were told that cheetahs are occasionally spotted in the area didn’t deter me. Although I must admit when I woke up at about 3am and I could hear some strange noises fairly close, the thought that I might be a cheetahs midnight feast did cross my mind. And the cheetah wouldn’t even have to figure out how to unzip the tent because after spending a good hour setting the tents up, we eventually decided to sleep in the open, under the starts because they looked so beautiful! But luckily I woke up at after sunrise with all my limbs in tact :)

A month has gone already since I arrived in Africa….it’s crazy how time flies. For some reason this week I’ve heard so many upsetting stories of children in the local area and how they became to be living in shelters and orphanages. It’s just so heart-breaking especially because they’re only children. I’ve now volunteered my Sundays to a orphanage that cares for babies and children under 5 (although currently the oldest child there is only 3 years old), I went for the 1st time last Sunday and I loved it! All the babies are so adorable and so well behaved, although it’s not such a pretty picture when they’re all awake at the same time! I never knew that such small people could make so much noise in large numbers! But anyway there’s one little girl I just fell in love with, she’s 12 months and just so happy all the time, all you have to do is look at her and she smiles and giggles at you! I don’t know what her story is yet because I didn’t want to ask too many questions too early on. But I do know a couple of the others stories…one little girl who is 4 months old was abandoned by her mother in a public toilet. The guess is that her mum was either a teenager or in another position where she couldn’t care for her. Another little boy who is about 10 months was found by a charity worker in a house with his mother and 2 older siblings. His mother was infected with AIDS and too unwell to take care of her kids. Like I said I didn’t want to ask to many questions and although I wasn’t told, my guess is that his siblings are in another orphanage for older children and their mother has probably since died from AIDS. And then yesterday, we visited a organisation called Hope Mission who focus on rehabilitating street kids. Street kids are school aged children who aren’t necessarily orphans but who aren’t not living in stable homes for some reason or another. They could have been neglected by their parents or their parents were unable to physically or financially care for them and then subsequently they spend most of their time on the streets and don’t attend school. There are two Hope Missions, one each for boys and girls and the one we visited was the girls one. The lady that worked there explained to us that a lot of the girls whilst living on the streets would be picked up by men for sex, these men would flatter the girls making them feels special, buy them stuff in exchange for sexual favours. If it wasn’t sex, then it was some other trouble going on in their lives. Possibly abuse, or maybe even alcohol or drugs. Some of them were as young as 12. Hope Mission provides them with a home, food and a very minimal education. The mission doesn’t have a lot of money so they can’t even afford to hire teachers, instead they rely on volunteers to teach the girls, they even asked us to help teach them basic English and Maths so that hopefully they can get the girls back into government schools. And to top off my week of sad stories, I learnt the background stories of two of the kids from the women and children’s shelter run by the main organisation that I work for. The oldest girl is now 11 years old but a few years ago her mum left her and her younger brother with grandparents so she could find work in the Okavango Delta, which a lot of tourists visit while in this part of Botswana. She found work as a guide on a boat that took tourists up and down the river. But she did not return any money to care for her children and instead spent her money on alcohol until the grandparents had enough and demanded the mother to look after her children. The mother took the older girl out of school, and by this time she had another baby, took them all up to the delta and pitched a tent for the kids to live in whilst she carried on working on the boats, leaving the older girl, aged 9 at the time, to look after her younger siblings including a young baby and she’d leave them in the tent for days without any food or contact. Today I went with one of the support workers to pick up the kids from school and at the 11 year old girl’s school they had a prize giving assembly in which she won five prizes including best student in her grade and she’s done so well in her exams that she gets to skip a grade and progress onto the following one, so she’s finally catching up with her education. I’ve only known her for a few weeks but I felt so proud of her, it would have been nice for her mother to have been around to see how far she’s come. And one of the other kids mother was 14 when she had him and died of AIDS aged 17. It’s sad that these children have had such traumatic starts in life. But I saw so many happy smiley little faces at the baby orphanage, at least the positives are that they’re all still here, healthy and well and finally being cared for properly.

It’s amazing how quickly a week goes! Recap: Friday was Independence day but sadly not much seemed to go on around here. A lot of people come from villages and other districts around Botswana and as it a holiday everyone goes home to spend it with their families (kind of like Christmas). But it didn’t matter because all week we we’re um-ing and ah-ing about booking a safari on the weekend as it was a long weekend and finally on Friday we booked a last minute day safari for Saturday. The safari truck picked us up at 6am to go and I’ve definitely never been so excited to wake up that early! But to cut a long story short, the safari itself was amazing! We saw elephants, giraffes, hippos, antelopes, zebras, monkeys and whatever else you’d expect. Only downside is we only saw one big cat which was a cheetah (impressively), but no lions…apparently they only really come out early in the morning so we missed them. And I really wanted to see a lion :( We had a quite close encounter with a couple of elephants who we were watching for a while and as we were about to drive off they decided to cross right out in front us and then stand there for a while giving us evils. It should have been quite a tense moment but when I’m nervous I laugh. So I just sat there and giggled…quietly. Oh and then as we were driving out of the wilderness, we broke down. Priceless.

In the middle of nowhere with no signal, no water (which we eventually had to ask for from another safari passer by) and in the home of wild animals, this should have been another tense but it again it was filled with nervous laughter. Anyway, good news is we made it home safe and sound.

Africa is so random. Even whilst writing this blog entry in the lodge that I’m now at, a group of African dancers just came outta nowhere and started performing. I love it!