See You All Soon

Hello one and all.

Greetings from Bulembu! We hope this finds you well? We are all doing fantastically!
We offer humble apologies for no blog on Friday. We tried to send it off but after three hours of trying it was still not working! This will probably be our last blog of the trip, due to slow internet and a super-busy schedule, unless we are able to access the internet again. ENJOY!

We have had a fantastic five days since our last blog, albeit, very busy...
On Wednesday we finally gave out all the football kits to the young people of the Bulembu Christian Academy. For those of you who don’t know, these kits came from Mr. Murphy’s company, and we had all packed the x10 full football kits by distribution into our bags on the way here. Once we had them all unpacked and sorted into correct teams on Tuesday evening, we were quite amazed at how many there were! The following day we had over five school teams, from junior to seniors all dressed up in the brand new attire and it seemed like we were part of the World Cup 2010 all over again! One teacher commented that it was possibly the best gift we could have brought over for the youth here and the smiles on the young people’s faces told the story!

Our work project continues to go very well with ‘most’ of the paint going on the walls and a bit on our faces, clothes and other interesting areas! The Bulembu project manager complimented us the other day by saying that we had been working very hard as a team and that the ‘new-school-to-be’ in a few months time was ahead of schedule and looking great!

The food continues to be absolutely scrumptious and plenty of it too. Then we ‘burn-it-off’ between meals by walking around at the ‘comfortable’ altitude of Bulembu at over 4000 feet – every-where!

In the evenings most of us congregate outside, ‘African-Style’ by the steel-drum-fire where much conversation follows on our day and the things to come.
Friday we started by spending our usual time with the Bulembu kids at school by doing sport, games, teaching and general TLC in their Academy. Then we move onto our dance and singing practice sessions, which are improving all the time. This afternoon some of us will be working hard at the project while others will be spending some quality time with the Bulembu youth group.

Everyone is working well as a team and it feels like we are one big family! It’s great that we are all good at different aspects of the trip like some people being morning people and starting us all off to a good day. While other talk and sing in the evenings as we ‘wind-down’ for the day.

We all absolutely LOVE it here and are considering staying until the end of the summer...

Just joking, we wish!

It’s such a privilege to be here and to be pioneers for what we hope will be an ongoing partnership. Things moved along at great pace over the weekend, starting Saturday with a ‘sleep-in’ until 8am! Most of the team then spent the morning working on the project and getting much needed progress done. The ‘Extreme-make-over’ African style at the old school, to become a new school, is looking amazing. The mural design is especially brilliant and is slowly beginning to take shape.
In the afternoon on Saturday we spent many joyful and action packed hours with the orphans up in their homes. The group was divided up into teams of two and before we knew it everyone was having an absolute whale of a time! The weather every day has been totally sunny with very cold starts in the mornings and pleasantly warm days.
Sunday morning we had another much needed sleep-in and then went to church. The Bulembu youth-team took the entire service and it was a morning to remember. The passion and spirituality of the people here, and especially the young people is truly inspirational. Mish was asked by the Bulembu young people to speak about his faith and did us all proud! There were many visitors from all over too making for a service of well over 500 people with some loud singing and dancing!

In the afternoon, after a hearty lunch of chicken and chips, we went exploring as a group and walked for over two hours to get to the another disused secondary school tucked away in a forest. We almost had a mutiny on our hands as many simply wanted to just chill-out at the accommodation, but a massive bag of freshly baked muffins, to be consumed at the half-way point of our mammoth walk, convinced everyone! We ended the day by watching the local men’s football tournament with lots of shouting, cheering and even vuvuzelas!

Although our days are often long and ‘hard’ our young people still have energy in the evenings to dance, song screech, and play football in the dark! However, normally by 9:30pm we are all in bed, fast asleep.
Today, Monday, we are at the school doing our usual thing all morning, swiftly followed by our last ‘Swazi-Dance’ practice before the BIG Day tomorrow where we will spend the entire morning doing all our class presentations and ‘authentic’ Swazi-Dance. Word has spread and the entire community is looking forward to it. A visiting group to Bulembu has never attempted a Swazi-Dance, so once again, we are making history! Don’t worry; you will all see the video 

Wednesday we will be all playing football and netball tournaments with the entire school and then winding up our project in the afternoon.

Then... Thursday morning we will be departing Bulembu  for the Kruger National Park  at 6am sharp. This should be a great opportunity to ‘wind-down’ and reflect on what has been an experience of a lifetime. We will all be very sad to leave Bulembu and the fantastic people here but some of us are already making plans to return.
So from the smallest, but possibly, greatest country in the Southern Hemisphere we hope you all have a great weekend.

With love, thoughts, hugs, prayers and whatever else you need... from us all,

Cheers from Team Bulembu.

Ps. We will communicate to Suki Binning (who will then communicate to you) on late Friday afternoon that we are all on-point to arrive, as per itinerary, back in the UK on Saturday morning.