The Youth Caravan 2010

BUIYSAPs long planned caravan started on the 3rd of October, rather hectically. We were woken up Sunday morning at 7 am by loads of young people arriving from every where to be taken out to the first school we were going to stay at, which was about two hours drive away, on bumpy dust roads. By midday about 60 people had arrived, but we only had one car..We were excepting a few cars from MS a bit later, so Malaika and I started the first move and filled up the car, and the roof, with luggage. The other cars arrived at around 7pm, so after 12 hours of waiting we were able to transport most of the young people to the school. But if it’s two things people in Zim have got, it is time, and patience. As long as they get a bit of food, they’re happy. And the food is one thing you HAVE to have enough of, and as our supervisor said- a big motivation for coming to work with you. You can’t hide the fact that a lot of the youth joining us for this caravan were there for the food, and the free t-shirt with BUIYSAPs logo on it. That doesn’t mean the youth just shows up and doesn’t do any work, it might just justify them to leave their homes and maybe the work they do in the field for their parents, to come help us out.

So Monday mid-day we had managed to move everyone, including ourselves over to Swelabo secondary school, and we were now counting around 120 youth! A larger number than we had planned for, but for the three days we stayed and worked at Swelabo, we managed to feed everyone and keep them happy, while making school benches for the schools in the Swelabo area, and teaching the community about the importance of educating their children. We had a big launch Monday afternoon where we had invited school committee members, the traditional leaders, the police, the DA, a representative from the ministry of education etc.., and the youth from BUYISAP performed songs and plays. We also tried to motivate the parents and guests to push further for promoting education for their children, and showed them how easily benches and other school equipment could be repaired with a bit of contribution from them.

The very positive thing when BUISAP does these arrangements, is that everyone helps out, so in the end it is the youth themselves that make sure that the food is being prepared, that there is enough water, that there is hot bath water for everyone, that everyone gets fed etc.. The water group and the cooking team might have been the ones working the hardest- collecting water for 120 people, mostly carried for about 1 km away on your head, is pretty hard, especially when its 35 degrees outside! I can’t picture a 100 Norwegian youth on a youth camp walking 1 km to get water for everyone from the borehole, standing outside in the sun cooking for their peers over the fire for hours, or sleeping on a blanket on the floor surrounded by 60 other girls or boys for two weeks. Some of the girls also brought their babies- to Malaika’s and mine pleasure, some of the cutest babies I have ever seen! And having your baby with you doesn’t stop you from working has hard as the others, you just put your baby on your back, and you’ve got your hands free to work. After three nights in the first school we decided we had to cut down the number of youth, as food was already getting short, so there were quite a few disappointed youth that had to remind while the rest caught the bus at 5 am to the next school. All in all we spent about a week moving to three different schools, and helping out about 14 schools in the Nkayi disctrict. We managed to make about 380 benches, and calculating that four school kids can sit on each bench, that’s quite a few benches!

It was tough being around so many people all day, although we were lucky to be able to stay in some of the teachers houses most nights. When you graduate as a teacher you cannot choose where you want to work, so you might be from a different part of the country, hence there are teachers cottages in every school you go to in the rural areas. Some of the kids living furthest away from school, approx. 20- 30 km from the school, are sometimes allowed to stay there with the teachers, provided they cater for their own food.

It took quite a few trips to Bulawayo to be able to buy enough food for the whole caravan. There were a few main ingredienses- maize meal, potatoes, cabbage, onions and tomatoes, and a variation of these were used for every meal, meaning that you would basically eat the same thing everyday (which is quite a normal thing to do). The Sunday we started the caravan, a cow was slaughtered in our backyard, and another was slaughtered the week after, so that we had enough meat for the whole time. Slaughtering a cow is a cool thing to do here, and all the boys were eager to partake in the slaughtering, while posing for my camera. They did it all themselves, from carefully taking the skin of, cutting the different parts out, rinsing out the stomach of grass (I didn’t know how much grass could actually be inside of a cow! Check out the photos if you’re interested) And everything is being eaten; from the head to the stomach to the feet and the tounge. Let’s just say Malaika and I have happily been vegetarians the last two weeks! And since there’s no fridge, the meat had an interesting smell at the end of the week. We were sitting with just the staff eating one night, talking about the meat. John, our manager had come to visit in one of the schools we were staying at, and he was talking to Talita about how their group had cooked the meat three times so you couldn’t taste that it had gone bad. Talita said they hadn’t been as lucky with our group, and that was the reason she had cooked something else for Malaika and me that day, as she knew the meat was off! We had to laugh, and explain them that at home we would have thrown everything out, if there even were the slightest suspicion the meat had gone bad. The didn’t get that- you just cook it long enough and it will be fine!