Edward in Swaziland

By Edward Good

I had very good preparation for my volunteering with BOVA, but I still had no idea what it was actually going to be like.
 
The volunteer programme is pretty large in terms of scope. The volunteers’ dorms are in the middle of the Salesian school. The Salesian school is a fee paying high school, and is effectively a well established school for boys in Swaziland and so the potential/ need for any volunteer involvement here is virtually nil. Outside of the Salesian school however there is a real need.  Everything else is run by the MYC or Manzini Youth Care NGO (non-government organization).

The MYC runs/ oversees 4 different homes, essentially orphanages, for boys in their care. In addition to these it runs Sandrini, a small school to improve the basic education of boys who have only recently come off the streets and Enjabulweni which is a bridging school, teaching boys up until Grade 7. Above these it runs various adult education schemes and has a large number of workshops which are used to develop practical skills. Some of these workshops are also used as a base from which individuals affiliated with MYC can start their own businesses with loans from the EU. These range from a restaurant which I have visited a couple of times (less than a pound for a plate of chicken and rice) to a hairdressers and a car mechanics.

When I first arrived I was frustrated. Having wanted to get heavily involved from the start I was limited by my lack of knowledge of the workings of the programme and the laid back African approach. Such an approach is commonly referred to as ‘African time’ whereby a meeting arranged for 12 may not take place until 2, if at all, depending on whether or not the other person turns up.

Soon however, I felt as if I was playing a meaningful role and was starting to develop a routine. One Saturday, for instance, the 7th grade boys from Enjabulweni had an entrance exam to try and get into Salesian school. This represented a huge opportunity for all of them to try and get a good quality education and improve their lives by attending one of the best schools in the country. I think their fees would be covered by a combination of MYC sponsorship and Salesian money. In preparation for these exams, Christian and Thomas, two German volunteers, Dan, a 30 year old American teacher who is volunteering over here, and I, ran tutoring sessions after school for a couple of hours. I prepared a session on Maths for them on one afternoon and it was really enjoyable to work one-on-one with the boys who very rarely have such close teaching contact. Hopefully one or two will make it.  We continued these sessions twice a week in preparation for their end of year exams.

Since my mornings had been largely empty, I started sitting in on Grade 4 classes at the Sandrini School. I had been told that two possible issues with doing this might be to firstly cause resentment from the teacher, or secondly to encourage a teacher to gratefully view you as a replacement and simply walk out of the class. However I was fortunate and neither of these things was a problem. From 8 till 10 the boys have an hour of Maths and an hour of English. My presence in the class hopefully went some way towards keeping the boys on task and I was able to help one-on-one with some of the English exercises. Their level of knowledge can range from being good to non-existent and is patchy to say the best. I guess one of the biggest challenges is to fill such gaps. For instance on a comprehension exercise one boy couldn’t understand the concept of the word ‘when’ in English and ended up answering a completely different question to the one asked of him (the MYC boys in particular have poor English having grown up speaking almost entirely siSwati which is the national language).

In terms of sports, the Germans and I stayed after tutoring to play football with the Enjabulweni boys who love to play and seem to relish our presence. Sometimes  we drove to Sikhunyana which is a home for some of the much younger boys. We played cards and passed a rugby ball around and then I would run through the Nottingham 1st team pre-match warm up with them (my uni experience coming in handy) which they seemed to love. We’d finish with a game of football before it got dark (football is by far the preferred sport and is a sure way of maintaining declining concentration levels).

I got the impression that the boys must operate as a close-nit family in the homes and seem very loving towards one another. I witnessed a boy of about 9 or 10 getting frustrated with another boy and start to hit him, at which point another came along and very caringly just held the angry boys hands in his lap until he had relaxed. However, saying this I did see one boy in his late teens throw a brick at one of his peers which only just missed.

The younger boys at Sikhunyana love our visits and come and adoringly hug us, climb on us or simply hold our hands. They generally react to my body hair with a mixture of fascination and humour.  One night however, when leaving Sikhunyana, having bought the boys a football, a few of them repeatedly pointed out that they didn’t like their clothes, that their shoes didn’t fit (most do not have shoes and play football amongst broken glass) etc and asked if they could have mine. Whilst this is not unusual I felt that night, for the first time, that the approach of one of the boys who was talking to me in such a way had almost taken on a more aggressive and threatening tone. It is difficult to know how to react to this. Such behaviour takes away from the image of the boys as angelic playful individuals but, on the other hand, the boys can hardly be blamed for being jealous, or wanting better material possessions, especially coming from their backgrounds. I suppose the best way to respond to this attitude is to try and change their expectations over time. For instance I am now of the opinion that giving the boys objects such as sweets is a bad idea. We were there to provide support and love to the boys who have had little of either in their lives. Substituting our time and attention for material gifts creates an expectation amongst the boys that volunteers and social workers are people to simply be exploited which detracts massively from our main purpose for being here. We needed to make it clear to the boys that the gift of the football was a one off event.

On the social side of things, the head social worker here is a bloke called Alban who is a really good person. He spends the week doing everything he can for the boys before spending the entire weekend in a drunken stupor. He is originally from Zimbabwe and took us to his friend’s son’s birthday party one Sunday. The Zimbabweans I spoke to seem well educated (and rich). One bloke told me he lectured in computer science at the national university and bemoaned the Swazi education system for delivering him first year students with no knowledge of Microsoft Word.

Volunteering was a fantastic experience; I grew very attached to the boys and it made me re-evaluate a whole of lot of things in my life.  For instance, I came back home to a pile of Christmas presents and told my parents it was too much – that was a first!

Anyway, hope this gives you some idea of how I got on and a flavour of volunteering with BOVA in Swaziland.