As we mentioned last week, we were approved for our TRP’s (temporary resident permits) but did not have all the paperwork taken care of. Well as of Monday we can now reside in Swaziland (officially) for two years! We headed into Mbabane on Monday and got all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed for our TRP’s and paid an exorbitant amount of money and were good to go. We finished in record time (only 2-3 hours were spent at the government offices. We had heard horror stories of all day lines and no success.) Afterwards, since we had planned on being at the government offices much longer, we found some time to do a little shopping. I found a health food store at one of the malls that carried black beans! I was so excited. That meant that Mexican food was well on its way. Then at a grocery store we found some tortilla chips! Another fantastic and rare find. The whole way home I had visions of Mexican food dancing through my mind (can you tell I miss it?). We also hit up a fabric shop, to purchase fabric for seat cushions for the kitchen table and apron for me, and grabbed a pizza (or two) on the way out of town. It was a long day, but extremely successful!
On Tuesday I set out to make a tasty Mexican meal for dinner. I started by whipping up some guacamole, only to realize I didn’t have any lime juice. I improvised with a little lemon juice and it was still tasty. Then I made some homemade tortillas! That’s right folks, homemade tortillas. They were actually surprisingly easy. The only difficult part was getting them thin enough to resemble tortillas. They were excellent on the first day, but did not warm up as well. Next on the list was black beans. Despite losing electricity halfway through cooking (I was using a crock pot), they still turned out amazing. I cooked up a little meat, threw in some taco seasoning (found at another volunteer house – although we through out afterwards because the flavor was a little off) and had a well rounded Mexican feast! It wasn’t quite Puerto’s or El Mazatlan, but we still thoroughly enjoyed it. I have been eating black beans and rice all week. At breakfast (and sometimes lunch) I have been making scrambled eggs with cilantro and serving with black beans and rice topped with guacamole (or avocado when we ran out). Mmm…delicious! I am sad to report that we only have one or two more servings of black beans left.
On Thursday morning Mikayla and I went out with some child care staff to go on a few home visits. Mikayla was extremely well behaved and interacted nicely with the children at the homesteads. She even fell asleep in my arms on the way home. Sweet (and rare) moment!
This is Mikayla at one of the homesteads. She got out of the car and marched right up to sit down with all the kids. Picture quality isn’t great because it was taken on my phone!
The most exciting part of our week was on Saturday when we decided to hit up a game reserve about 45 minutes down the road (Nisela). When we got there they said that they were not doing any game drives because they were working on the rides (ironically enough nobody was actually out in the park working on roads). Ben ended up talking one of the guys into letting us do a self guided driving tour for only E50 (about 6 bucks)! We spent the first hour or so driving around and not seeing much of anything. We saw some kudu and other deer like animals, a couple of ostrich but nothing we hadn’t seen before. We were getting ready to park and have a little snack when I spotted the first giraffe!! We saw so many, it was amazing. They would stop and stare at us. At the closest point we were probably 20 meters away. Fantastically beautiful creatures. I told Ben that I would probably never stop getting excited about seeing giraffes, no matter how many times we were to see them while living here. After viewing the giraffes (and snapping a ton of pictures) we headed back to the lodge to eat lunch. And much to our surprise we got to watch the giraffes grazing while we ate our lunch. Highlight of my week! I am going to try and post a just animals post soon so I won’t show you all the giraffe pictures just yet!
It was like they were posing for the camera!
Our lunch view! Amazing!
