Day 9 Monday March 30

Today we headed off to the Umvoti ADP Office located in Greytown a good two hour drive from Zinkwazi. We had to stop at the KMP Office first as we were to lose Ian this week; he was falling behind in his work at the office, so we picked up Pumi who was to be our driver for the week. When we arrived at the office we were shown into a meeting room where we again had Devotionals and greetings all round. We were told about their hopes for what they would like to accomplish in this area. The WV Programme only started in 2008 and is at it's first stage after an assessment which highlighted a great need for World Vision intervention to improve the socio-economic standards of the Umvoti community. (That's Mike in the picture, a community worker with the ADP, who was to come everywhere with us this week and at this point was showing me around, the building in the back is a kindergarden, church and theand the ADP Office.) In the one year they have been operating, they held a 'Birthday Bounce Back' where 1000 children received new track suits for school, while attending parties in all the villages where the children were registered. They said that the children were so happy as some of them had never owned new clothes. This was done to ensure that even those children who have not had birthday parties to enjoy, now know how it feels to have a birthday. The theme of the event was "Your Child is My Child". Children participated through various activities ranging from traditional dance and gospel music. Most of them were singing songs "thank you World Vision, you have a place in our hearts, thank you World Vision."
All the people at the office are new to their jobs and most seemed quite shy and unsure. I'm sure they will soon gain the confidence of the KMP group. We left the office and headed to the Masibumbane Community Garden in Matimatolo, which is one of the 'wards' of Umvoti, much like our municipalities. Again, it was about 1/2 hour or so to get there. The distances these folks have to travel to get any where amazes me! Here we were suppose to help weeding the garden and other odd jobs, but the whole thing turned into a rather fun time, instead. The ladies thought that these Canadians were pretty funny trying to do some hoeing, with the little tap, taps of the hoes and had to come and show how it was really done! WHACK! WHACK! Now that's the way to do it! There was much laughing and giggling. A couple of the ladies went off down the bottom of the garden and came back to show us the 'African potato', which to me looked and tasted exactly like Hawaiian poi. Along with maize (corn) it's one of the main staples of their we could see and area of slums, which rather surprised me, as diet. Nobhule then showed us how to carry a bucket of them properly, so we all had a go, but none of us was very successful at it! As you can imagine with 4 hours traveling time, there and back and our few hours at the office, it didn't leave much time to be at the garden. Just outside the town of GreytownGreytown seemed to be a very small town (not that we saw much of it, it might have been bigger than I thought) so I wondered why people would gravitate there. There must be some other industries there to attract them. We had seen large areas of forestry on the way to Umvoti, rather than the sugar cane, but the trees were not what we here, would consider big, they reminded me of Alders. We also saw large areas of gum trees and depending whether we asked Pumi or Mike about the logging and where the trees went, we would get differing answers. We found that with most questions we asked on this part of the trip. Perhaps the logging was what was attracting people to the area. When we were home that evening, after dinner our group got talking and we were all saying that we were feeling like we weren't been shown the REALITY. I guess I wasn't the only one who had been feeling that everything had been rather 'safe' so far and not quite what we had been expecting. We HAD seen some schools, that didn't look totally run-down, visited the clinic and learned the devastation and impact HIV/AIDS was having, etc. but felt we had yet to see the real side of Africa that we had come to see. We felt that we were being handled with kid gloves, so to speak. The next few days would set us straight.