Our week seemed to fly by, but I am not sure what all we did! On Sunday we celebrated our 7th anniversary! Crazy! We celebrated by making a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon and then relaxing for most of the rest of the day. We had big dinner plans of grilled Impala, salad with a special strawberry find (berries are hard to come by here and are very expensive) and couscous. We spent all afternoon anticipating our dinner plans. About halfway into cooking the Impala our gas went out. So we went over to another volunteers house to "borrow" their gas since no one was staying there. Let me just say that carrying a tanks that weighed over 150 pounds 100 yards was not my idea of a good time. I am very much a weakling, just ask Ben who had to carry most of the weight on his back. It took us much longer than expected on account of me being too weak and so our Impala got a little over done. It was still tasty, but would have been much better had we not overcooked it!
Speaking of Impala, on the way back from the grocery Saturday evening we saw several live Impala and my all time favorite animal ever…a giraffe, actually two giraffes! They were in a private game reserve on the side of the road. Let’s just say I was so excited I had Ben drive by three times before it got to dark to see them any more! Too bad we didn’t have camera.
Speaking of creatures, we have seen quite a few of them this week. We saw a Southern tree agama (look him up because he was too fast to photograph with our phones) who was absolutely gorgeous. He is a lizard with a bright blue head and tail! We also saw another foam nest tree frog (also look them up – thanks John David and Brittany for helping us identify it!). They are a large white frog that tends to hang out by our kitchen window when it rains. Of course we saw some birds, lots of birds actually. Finally we saw these guys:
Rain spider. Please note the white powder that we have sprayed all around our house (it is called DOOM). I am pretty sure it could kill us, but it keeps out all the creepy crawlies. Especially the ants!
Millipede – We actually saw several of these this week. This guy was curled up into a ball on our front porch.
Stick Insect – Mikayla actually spotted this one on our front door. She was fascinated with it.
We even found some seeds that we have named Swazi jumping seeds. They are literally seeds that jump around on the ground. We got curious about why they were jumping, so we opened them up and found a tiny worm inside. It looked like a maggot, but I couldn’t be sure. Mikayla thought they were pretty cool and kept calling them caterpillars. Which worked out nicely because we studied the letter C this week! I love when life lines up with school.
We lost electricity several times this week. At one point I thought we were going to have to host a large braai (BBQ) to cook all the meat we had in our freezer. But luckily the electricity came back on just in time and our meat was saved.
We also got another package in the mail this week from my parents filled with candy, school stuff, art stuff, a light scoop for our camera and more. Mikayla had a blast pulling everything out and of course the candy is almost all gone by now! Amazing how quickly it gets eaten up in our household!
On Saturday we headed into Ezulwini (a town between Mbabane and Manzini) with Sister Diane to hit up some craft markets. She was searching for items to take with her on an upcoming trip to the states to resell and try to raise some funds for Cabrini. Along the way we picked up a beautiful painted wooden platter and two batiks. I can’t wait to hang them up around the house. We had a relaxing day and ate lunch at a beautiful restaurant with delicious food.
I will leave you with this amazing picture of Mikayla we found on our old camera from one of our first few days here.
Mikayla and her bedhead!
