After 24 hours of travel we have landed up in Paradise! We are in Rondavels in iMfalozi Safari Park and were greeted by giraffes as the sun was going down.
Giraffes at sunset
Wifi is very unreliable here and we are out walking most of the day. I shall try to catch up as we go along.
It has been a morning of paddling pool and an afternoon of garden centre and homework, sewing and reading and for LiveWireT, a party to go to wearing her silver sandals.
Charming sign at the garden centre
Just time to sew the cat’s eyes
Party sandals
Tomorrow evening we fly to South Africa so there may not be a post.
We came upon this community of elephants quite by chance when driving through the bush after our volunteering. We watched them for more than half an hour, playing in the water , gathering together and then leaving all together, the adults looking after the baby in their community and calling on the teenager to catch up and stop messing about. I have always loved elephants and this half hour was such a beautiful treat. Click on any image for more detail.
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1 Sorting the bookshelves today, this precious piece of paper fell out. It is a beautiful note given to us as we left the village of Mapoch where we had been volunteering in 2007.
Message from Thabang
2 We used to keep in touch with the village through Voluntours, getting beaded decorations to sell each Christmas to help raise funds for the village. Very sadly, we have lost both Marnie of Voluntours and Pastor Peter to cancer in the last 15 months. They were each instrumental in making our time there a success and both must be sorely missed by the village. Now we have no contact, these are my last three decorations for sale.
Beaded decorations made by the Gogos of the village
3 At singing tonight, we learned a new Thomas Merritt carol, in one session! It is a wonderful one with the various parts coming in at intervals and sounding like peals of bells. I’ll try to get a recording of it to add here.
This is one of my favourite “Inside” photos. It shows the contents of the case that I took to South Africa when we went volunteering in a village called Mapoch. The stacking cups and the wooden beads were toys which our own children had played with many years ago.
Inside my case
The subsequent photos show some of the toys we took being played with by the children in the pre-school. We went to help build an extra classroom and to work with the teacher and the children. It remains one of the best things I have ever done. The village and the people will be a part of me forever.
Sadly I lost all my photos from the trip but I did keep a diary so these photos are from the diary and are therefore not the best quality.
Children playing
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/photo-challenge-inside/
1 These amazingly beautiful wash basins are in the Ladies’ loos at Mpumalanga Airport.
Wash basin at Mpumalanga Airport
Another wash basin at Mpumalanga Airport
2 I’ve always loved this philosophy for life and enjoyed this lovely old photo that came with it in a message from a friend.
3 Going through some old photos, I found this of a beautiful little street that I took one summer.
Blue walls
Opening Fb this morning I found the very sad news that the lovely young woman who organised Voluntours and through whom we did our Volunteering in Mapoch,S.A. died last night after a long illness. The very next thing I saw was Eleanor Roosevelt’s reminder to live our lives the best we can.
“The purpose of life, after all, is to love it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.”
This is how Marnie lived her too-short life and what she encouraged everyone else to do. Meeting Marnie and her family and working in the community of Mapoch was one of the richest experiences of my life so far.
Last year we also lost the wonderful Pastor Peter Mbasa from the Mapoch community. Here’s what he said about Marnie and the Volunteers she organised.
” I personally believe that your continuous involvement in the upliftment of the people has finally come to fruition. It has sparked some sense of self worth in the people. It makes me think of an avocado seedling. It takes from five years to thirteen years to bear fruit. But once it starts to bear fruit, it’s good nutrition for the body. And you will want to plant more because you are proud of the fruit. Some people never live long enough to eat the fruit, but people will always remember who planted the tree. Sometimes it does not even matter who planted the tree, as long as it will feed others. And its shade is the best to rest under in sunny days. Thank you my friends.”
Here, you can see the always smiling Marnie in the middle. Sibongile, the teacher, is to the left and to the left of her, is the classroom we helped to build. The fence, funds raised by the pupils at the school I had just retired from, is here in the process of being erected by another volunteer.
‘Sisters under the skin.’ The sisters with whom I worked in the classroom took me to their hearts and called me their sister.
1 The sky is the most beautiful blue today, cloudless and quite stunning.
Cloudless blue sky over Cornwall this morning
2 Leaning against the tree trunk and looking up though the tree that is greening up with new growth was lovely and attracted a few odd looks in town this morning!
Looking up through the greening tree into the bluest of skies
3 I posted a mother leopard with a cub up on a mound for this week’s Photo Challenge and found this lovely Cheetah as I was going through the photos of our trip to South Africa.
A Cheetah
We were coming back from a safari when the guide suddenly pointed out these two leopards, mother and cub up on a mound. We watched these beautiful animals for some time as the sun was going down.
Leopard mother and baby up on a mound
Zoom in on the leopards
Today I want to tell you about Pastor Peter Mabasa, a wonderful man whom we met in 2007 and whose death, far too young, we heard about yesterday.
In 2007, just as we retired, we went out to Mapoch, South Africa, as volunteers to help build a new classroom for the pre-school in the village. It was there we met Pastor Peter and we became good friends. Peter had had a very hard life, living under Apartheid suffering from all the mistreatment that that entailed and even when it was all over, still finding himself in a bad way and, ‘living under the bridges’ as he put it. Then he met another Pastor who helped him back to life and in time, Peter became the Pastor for the village where we found ourselves.
As soon as we met him, we shared laughter and over the days, as the work was done each day, we sat under the tree in the shade and had long, fascinating discussions about religion (Peter was an Apostolic Christian and we are Humanists) philosophy, corruption, crime and impoverishment. We shared ideas, quotations, and had lots of laughs. We discussed language, his and ours, each helping with vocabulary and pronunciation. He spoke five languages –IsiZulu, Ndebele, Tswana and Afrikaans as well as English! It was partly his knowledge of the local language and of English that led to him being appointed as ‘Site manager’, translator and liaison between us and the local builders with whom we were working.
Pastor Peter and Mr S sharing laughs together
We have some lovely memories of Peter:
Peter in Mr S’s hat and delighted with the toilet seat for the new latrines being built
Pastor Peter in his autographed hard hat
Without Peter there, the whole experience would have been very different. His ability to manage and negotiate with the builders was crucial to the success of the project. His open-mindedness and constant good humour were an example to all and the fact that we three got on so well made it a very rewarding time for each of us.
I once read that we do not ‘make’ new friends, rather, we recognise friends when we first meet them. Peter and we ‘recognised’ each other. We are so sorry about his untimely passing and send our love and condolences to his family, to his Congregation and to the whole village who will miss him, his laughter and his love so much.
Kagiso Pre-school, the original part, painted, the new classroom and our friends waving Goodbye
I’m sorry about the poor quality of the photos. I have had to take photographs from the diary I wrote at the time as all our photos of the time were lost when our computer crashed some time ago.
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