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Ok, so I know I haven't done a blog entry for ages but I'll try and keep this relatively short...
I did two weeks of teaching at Ezulwini Catholic School (including one week on my won!) which was fab but I'm now having a bit of a break from teaching. Last week we all went to Mozambique for 6 days which was really really nice. It was basically a holiday, first we spent one night in the capital Maputo which was fairly nice but we were staying in a bit of a rank backpackers! Also there are malaria mosquitoes in Moz so I was back on the prophylactics and under the mosquito net - not fun! Maputo is really strange, it's not like Africa at all as it was a Portuguese colony the capital has a very distinct Portuguese/Spanish feel to it. This is added to by the fact that the national language is Portuguese, I attempted to remember bits of my Spanish GCSE with varying success...
After that we went down to a place in between Tofo and Inhambane and just chilled on the beach for 4 days except one day when we went swimming with whale sharks! This was amazing and definitely the highlight of the trip. They're HUGE, a mixture between a whale and a shark (obviously!) and luckily they only eat plankton. Mozambique is the best place in the world to see them though so snorkelling up close with them about a foot away from your face was absolutely brilliant. Once you get over the shock of how big they are and the fact that they have 'shark' in their name you realise that they're really chilled out and kinda just hung out with us for about 10 minutes solid.
We went to a place called Flamingo bay whilst in Moz which is a resort built entirley over the sea and consisting entirely of jeti's and wooden huts. It was SO nice, except when we left the kombi (mini bus) got stuck in the sand so we had to push it out. This was a bit of a problem as all of us except the 2 guides are girls...! Anyway after backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards and nearly getting my foot run over we managed it!
We came back on Sunday which would have involved a 10 hour trip except we got stopped by the Mozambican police, who are complete a*******s and only want bribes, to be told that we don't have the correct papers. They then decided to take our drivers' licence and our border pass - not very helpful when you're about 5km from the border! We did have the right papers as we'd been checked by about 10 other police officers whilst driving around the whole week but they wanted us to pay 6000 meticals which works out as about 150 pound. Needless to say at the end of the week no one had this money so we had to go and get a guy from immigration at the border to help us, they still had to pay a bribe though! But at least we got home - even if the trip did end up taking 13 and a half hours!!!
I'd like to say I took loads of pictures of Mozambique but unfortunately I didn't as a lovely man decided to snatch my bag on the Sunday before leaving for the trip. I therefore lost all pictures of South Africa and Swaziland as I hadn't managed to back them up yet, but luckily I have a copy of a friends pictures. I'll try and upload some of those asap. The guy also stole my phone so I have a new number 00268 6553739 until I go back to SA. It's really annoying and inconvenient more than anything and I was really disillusioned with being here at the time especially being here as a volunteer and trying to help but once you get back to all the good things, and the kids especially, you soon forget the minor hiccups!
For this week and next I'm working on a library project which involves introducing libraries in to 2 schools here. It means cleaning the rooms, buying the paint (which we did yesterday), painting (tomorrow) and the sorting out and categorising of the books. It's quite a big task but Sile (who I'm doing it with) and myself have made a massive start and it'll be really good as we'll be leaving something behind when we come home and something the kids can really use. I'll keep you all posted on the progress...
Much love as always XX
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