Splashy Fen

These Mountains/hills were the back drop of the festival...they were so cool looking!
My friend Lisa and I trying desperately to escape the sun!

Sitting around the camp fire Saturday morning. Note my sneakers...I think I bought gum boots from a truck going into the festival about 5 min after this picture was taken!
Morgan, Myself, Louisa (friends in my program)
The volunteers/workers stayed about a 15 min walk from the rest of the festival, so this picture was taken from our camp site and you can see the rest of the festival in the distance (all the white dots).
A Zulu group who performed at Splashy (I think the only Zulu group actually).

Friday March 21st a big group of kids from my program went to this huge music festival in South Africa called Splashy Fen. We stayed Friday-Monday. Its nick name is the South African Woodstock. It was really fun, but the weather caused a few complications to say the least! It was in the mountains so during the day it would reach the upper 90's but at night it was FREEZING!! And it would rain every evening so there was ridiculous amounts of mud, but we still had an amazing time! By the second day we all had gotten our hands on a pain of rain boots (or gum boots as they are called here) which made a HUGE difference. Our Zulu teacher works at the festival every year so she volunteered us to work and we were given tickets and accommodation (tents) as long as we worked a few shifts so it worked out great. It was kind of rough though...we had to go straight from the festival to our third homestay! So we all arrived really muddy and tired!

Umfolozi/Uhluhulwe Game Reserve

Here are a few of my pictures from the Game reserve we visited on 3/12/08. We did a game drive from 6-10 am and then in the afternoon went on a Hippo and Croc tour.

Ohwebede Rural Homestay

Sanelle, Bongeka, Ayanda, and I
View from our yard of other homesteads
Sanelle
Ayanda
Carrying water on my head!
Pumping water at 5:30 am!
The little guys doing some Zulu dancing
Sanelle in my shades!
View of the beach
The four siblings on my last night. Bongeka and Sanelle in front. Ntokoso in the middle and Ayanda in the back on the right.

Sarah and I in our uniform skirts Gogo made for us
The family and I on my last morning
Sanelle and I after a looooong hike to the beach at the top of a sand dune.
Sarah, Sanelle, Ntokoso, Ayanda and I. You can see the main house in the background off to the left. That is where the kitchen, main room, and Gogo's room is.
Sarah, Gogo, and I at our braai on our last night

The house where Sarah and I stayed is the one in the middle. The house off to the left is the "ancestor house" because Gogo's husband died in 2003.
Playing soccer
Gogo packaging fireballs to sell the next day and cooking our braai


My rural homestay was in a town called Ohwebede about an hour and a half North of Durban. We left Saturday 3/1/08 and stayed through Monday 3/10/08. Everyone was assigned a partner to live with for the homestay and I was paired with a girl named Sarah who goes to George Washington University and is from Seattle.

My families surname is Mukhize. There is Gogo (Grandma, 53) Ntombi (Gogo's neice who was 19) Ntokoso (male, 10) Ayanda (male, 7) Bongeka (female, 5) and Sanelle (male, 4). Gogo's daughter Gugu (33) came for the second weekend (3/8-3/9). She works in Durban and comes to Ohwebede every other weekend. All four children were Gugu's.

Gogo raises all four kids. She has several different forms of employment. She sells fried dough balls (guine), fire balls, chips, scones, and other snacks under a tree at the high school to students at lunch time. She also made uniforms for the high school girls and charged 60 Rand for them. She also sells food such as popsicles, pologni, and other random goods out of her home.


The views from this town were absolutely amazing! It was right on the coast (some houses closer than others to the beach). The houses were spaced out quite a bit, surrounded by hills in all directions. Our homestead did have electricity (it would randomly go off) but no running water. We had to get it from a pump a little ways down the road...it felt like Montauk! The women taught us how to carry the buckets of water on our head (we were horrible at it, but it was still fun!).


Well I'm not going to lie the first few days were a little rough! The language barrier was extremely high, so we definitely improved our Zulu over the 10 days. We stayed in the circular house with the thatch rough pictured above, with Ntombi and Bongeka. Sarah and I made the mistake of spraying Raid insect killer all over our room the first few nights which drew out the bugs, especially cochroaches! Our Gogo was an exremely caring woman but she was also pretty tough so the first few days she definitely put Sarah and I in our place a few times!

As the days went on we grew to really love the family and each day we became more comfortable with them and vice versa. The kids were absolutely adorable! Sanelle (the four year old) was hysterical. He would constantly be chatting away in Zulu and we had no idea what he would be saying but he would just keep on going, giggling the whole time. All the kids were constantly in our room wanting to play and talk to us, none of them spoke any english at all though. Sanelle's nickname was Inguine (crocodile) which is perfect because he was such a little goofball!

During the week we walked to the primary school and met for class. I lived about 10 min away from the school but some SIT students had up to a 45 min walk. Each day we had a different theme...

Monday- Health, we visited the local clinic and a tradtional healer
Tuesday- Tribal Court
Wednesday- Education, visited primary and secondary school
Thursday- We spent a day a local eco-tourism project discussing development with students from the University of Zululand.
Friday-Zulu Final and beach!

Friday (3.7.08) I got some sort of allergic reaction all over my face. I think it was from the water because that was the only morning I didn't put antiseptic in the water. I went to the clinic after our Zulu final and got medicine and it cleared up in a few days. For the most part no one got any major illnesses. Several students got tick bite fever, different rashes, and basic intestinal "issues" most likely from the water.


Our second weekend with the family Sarah and I cooked spaggheti and meatballs for the family on Saturday night. To get the ingredients we piled in the back of a truck with our Gogo and drove for about an hour to a town with a supermarket. The trip back to our house was ridiculous because our Gogo bought enough groceries for about a month and it was Sarah, Gogo, and I and about 8 other people and a million groceries packed in the back of a pick up truck bouncing down the dirt roads! Sunday (3/9/08) we hiked to the beach with Ntombi, Gugu, Sanelle, and Bongeka. It was an hour through waist high grass and enormous sand dunes, but once you got there it was absolutely gorgeous! The people in the town never really go there though because of the distance. Sunday night they had a big braai (BBQ) for us.

It was so sweet...one of our Gogo's forms of employment is sewing uniforms for high school girls. So she measured Sarah and I and made us each a skirt! (see picture)

We left at 7 am on Monday (3/10/08). It was really sad to leave because I'm most likely never going to see them again. The beginning of the week it felt as if we would be there forever but by the end we wanted to stay longer. It was really hard for our Gogo to watch us leave. The day before she called our teacher at 6 in the morning to tell him that she loved the dinner we cooked for her and that she didnt want us to leave.