Mpaka!

Mpaka!

Although Mpaka might not mean anything out of context, Mpaka means the next two years for Ryan and I, and we are very pleased! On Friday we received our site placement for the next two years, and we are being placed in the town of Mpaka.  (Yes, it is an actual town on the map of Swaziland!) We are also spoiled enough to have yet another volunteer in our town, which is extremely rare.  We do not have all the information yet, but what we do know is that we will be moving into a multi-room hut with electricity, which is placed right on the main road (which means good things for transportation), and we also have a better understanding of what our jobs are going to be. 

Ryan is being placed at Mpaka Primary School teaching Life Skills and English, he will also be working on improving the library and the computer lab. We have heard only good things about the school where he is being placed; including that it is a fully functioning, semi-private school, and it’s always nice to work at a school that is actually functional.  Where Ryan, as an education volunteer, is being placed at a school, myself being a health volunteer, my job site is the community! Although I am excited to see exactly what that means, I have plenty of options to work with.  The first option is to work with the schools, as there is a Primary School, Junior School and High School where I can work with Ryan and Phylicia, the other volunteer placed in Mpaka.  There is also a clinic and what Swaziland calls a National Care Point, which is a center provided by the community where orphaned and vulnerable children go to get food and basic care.  Finally, and what I am most excited about, there is a refugee camp and a vocational school, and I hope to work closely with both.

Although Ryan and I have not been to Mpaka, and I do not know really what to expect, I am happy that we are in a town, close to a shopping town (Siteki), and only a half an hour away from Manzini, the biggest city in Swaziland.  If you look at the map we are just right of the center of the country, which is perfect location.  Close to all the big cities, and close to Mozambique!  We are also extremely close to a game park, which is rumored to hold lions! Mpaka is in the region of Lubombo, which means its going to be hotter than hell, but considering that we have discovered in the last 2 months that it can actually be really cold in Africa (who knew?) we are welcoming the hot weather. 

Besides receiving our site placement, we have spent this last week in the Hhoho region of Swaziland training about perma-culture. We hope to have an extensive garden of our own at our homestead, but that really depends on how our family feels about giving us a plot of their land.  (Although that sounds like a big favor to American ears, Swazi’s are surprisingly very liberal with their land.) We are starting out small with some basil and lavender pots, and hope to add on rosemary, thyme, tomatoes and garlic in the near future.  (Feel free to send us some seeds!) Once we move to our permanent site we will then negotiate with our host family about the size of our garden.

In other news, Ryan and I took our language proficiency test last week, and we are officially at the novice high level! Although it might not sound that impressive, that is actually right where we were suppose to score, so we are happy to be reaching that goal.  I have to remind myself that we have only been here 5 weeks, and that before we received our invite to serve in Swaziland I did not know that the language SiSwati even existed.  Cool thing about SiSwati is that it is actually extremely similar to SiZulu, which is a prominent language spoken in South Africa, so really it’s like two in one! We have another proficiency test during week 8, where we have to hit Intermediate Low. I am confident that with some hard work we will reach it.   We will also arrange to have a tutor continue to help us with Siswati even after training, because we are far from even being conversational, which is definitely a goal we both have. 

(PS – EMMA’s DAD – I heard that you have been reading our blog, and I am happy to report that Emma received the highest language score in our group! She is amazing! Also, she is doing well, and I am encouraging her to post more!)

Lastly, I am happy to report that our host family dog Sibi finally brought her new pup around for us all to love, and Make Joyce let us name him! We have named his Sidududu, which means motorcyle in SiSwati.  Mainly, it’s just a really fun word to say. She is free to rename him once we leave!

We also received our phones, so Mom, Dad, Chris and Loni, please call me soon!

Hope all is well in the land of the free.

Bongiwe