What We've Been Up To

We’ve been able to spend time at the piece of property that Manna has purchased. Brian is currently building a small home there and we too hope to build a home there. Arlyn has been already planning where he can place an aquaponic garden to teach people how to grow vegetables while using fish in a limited amount of space. The Manna property is beautiful; we travel on dirt roads up a mountain to get there and can enjoy beautiful views of the surrounding areas.

Brian’s home is almost finished the building stages and Arlyn and Brian hope to begin working on the roof soon. We went on a fact finding trip to try and purchase special pressure treated wood to build the roof and drove almost half way across the country in just over an hour. Unfortunately there are many cultural things that we need to learn and although we found some wood we didn’t realise that Friday was payday so the boss wasn’t working and we couldn’t discuss price. We also were able to go and look at grass that might be used to build a thatched roof.

Driving around in Swaziland we were able to experience the polite nature of the Swazi people. Most people will salute you when they drive by and like to flash their lights to thank you if you pull over while they overtake you.

These first few days have been spent getting to know the area and trying to adjust to the climate. It is so hot here, hotter than Haiti, and after experiencing -36 degrees Celcus just a few weeks ago its been taking us a while to adjust to Swazi heat. We’ve been able to go to the grocery store and get some food items and I’ve been shocked at the availability and choice of food, which is priced, similarly to Canadian/Irish food prices. I hope to visit an orphanage next week and begin volunteering there.

The only thing that we’ve been disappointed with so far is the internet connection. Swaziland has very slow internet that seems to work sporadically. Unfortunately I’m not the most patient person and after trying for a long time to load a web page I get frustrated and quit. We don’t think we’ll be able to respond to email too often but we would love to post about what we’re doing here on this blog, hopefully at least once a week.