An orphanage and Sheba's Breasts

     The 2^nd term of school is winding down and we do not have much access to the students, with classes ending for exams, then a week when the students come to school, but no classes are held while the teachers mark the exams, and the final week when nothing much happens. So we occupy ourselves.

Friday we went to a new part of the country for us, Shiselweni, in the southeast, to visit a volunteer we like a lot. She lives at a beautiful farm where an orphanage for about 50 children was established maybe 10 years ago. She works very hard, but loves the kids, and they love her. It was nice to see a new part of the country, although traveling everywhere by public transport is exhausting, and going new places can be a challenge.       Here is the entrance to her orphanage.

Her hut

And the shop from which she sells necklaces and bracelets fabricated from wound paper by local women as an “income generating activity,” something we all seek to develop; the man is looking at samples for his shop. 

I'd loved to have photographed her with the children, but that is forbidden. It can be very lonely for these young people, and I think it was nice for her to have a visit. She calls us Papa Bear and Mama.

We stayed Friday night in the Ezulweni Valley, the most beautiful part of Swaziland, surrounded by rocky hills, where many of the wealthiest people in the country live. Saturday morning we hiked up a rocky ridge to 2 knobs evocatively named Sheba's Breasts. The trail was the nicest I've encountered in this country, starting through thick forests of beautiful old fig trees, then to open slopes with a final steep scramble.

The late winter flowering trees are coming into bloom

     We were tired and glad to get back to site Saturday afternoon. Near our site we heard some children singing at a nearby homestead. They were rehearsing a song to perform in church the next day: “Raise your hands to the Lord,” or something like that.

As we left the woman directing them said she did not have money to transport them to where they should perform. We said we were sorry.

     For the next 2 weeks we will try to get to the students when we can, reading stories or just visiting with them, going over the writing we try to have them do in “journals.” Katherine has pulled 2 boxes of books from the High School that are too young for the students there, from the Books for Africa grant the High School received in May. We are working with the Primary School principal to open a “box library” for the poorer primary school, where books are unavailable and craved by some.

     In 2 weeks we hope to go with the wealthier school's 5^th and 6^th grades to Durban, SA for 4 days on a bus trip. The trip is still uncertain, because they are still waiting to see if enough parents can pay the required US $260 for each student to go. We hope the trip goes; we really like many of these kids, and we've never been to Durban. Seeing it through their eyes would be fun. Two of the younger teachers are going.

     Then at the end of August we go off for 2 weeks seeing Victoria Falls, camping 3 nights in Chobe Park in Botswana, and then 2 nights at a remote camp in the Okavanga Delta. Then back to Swaziland for the start of the 3^rd term. Towards the end of September Denver friends from South Africa visit and we go with them to one of the nicest game reserves in the country, one that is hard to reach by public transport.

     I rode my bike Sunday afternoon, for exercise. I heard one of a group of girls, all dressed up coming from church, call my name, so I stopped as I usually try to do when someone calls me by name, and walked a ways with them. She is in 10^th grade at the High School. We talked about her up-coming exams. We passed a dressy middle-aged woman, who asked them questions in siSwati that I could not follow, prompting laughter. I asked what she had said. My student said she had asked which of them was my favorite. I said meaning girl-friend and she said yes. I hollered back at the woman, in my best siSwati, that I was a teacher, the girl was my student. But you know, the existence of that relationship does not dispel suspicion. Damn.