Before even arriving at Vusumnotfo, we knew that our experience here would be unlike any of the other community projects. Vusumnotfo, which means “revive the economy” in Siswati, is an NGO whose primary concern is development at a grass roots level in the 18 chiefdoms it is responsible for. When we all arrived, we were greeted by the director Cathy, her daughter Allison, several dogs, cats and insects ranging from ants to jumping spiders.
Once we had settled in and had some lunch, we were given an introduction/ orientation by Cathy, just so we were up to date with what was expected of us as well as what we expected from the experience. Having lived and worked in the area for at least ten years, Cathy was able to give us absolutely valuable and unique insight into the issue of development especially within Swaziland.
Well, Thursday the 6th of January is the first day we went to our projects, which involved painting a pre-school, which is almost an hour away from the youth centre we are staying at. Fortunately, this particular day was Sylvester’s birthday (one of our facilitators). Painting the whole building took us about four hours to put the first layer. It is a unique project we are doing and we got to know about the “Swazi green gold” (we’ll talk about that in our next post)…
Laia (Spain), Nosimilo ( Swaziland), Helen (Ethiopia), Sebastian (The Netherlands), Gilmore (Zimbabwe), Thapelo (Swaziland), Hale (US), Sylvester (Swaziland), Karoline (Germany), Wadeisor (Zimbabwe)
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