Rocking Rocky Road
Trip Start
Sep 10, 2008
1
8
71
Trip End
Sep 03, 2009
The Crags,
Western Cape,
South Africa
Sunday, October 12, 2008
There have been quite a few new additions to the Rocky Road family since last year that I was here. As well as ongoing building work, there is a whole new generation of chickens, some of which hatched a few days after my arrival and 3 sheep, (triplets rejected by their mother and took on by the RR team because the farmer didn't have time to rear them), which don't have names but are generally referred to as shank, joint and chop. One of them sounds like its saying "I'm Bad" everytime it calls so I christened it Michael Jackson. However, we've been told not to get too attached, as rumour has it, they're Christmas dinner
Welcome sign
. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that Pushkin the 22 year old cat is still alive.
In between stepping over sheep to get through the door and having a really, really bad stomach bug, I've been doing a variety of voluntary work. I started off doing a couple of days at women on the move (producing crafty stuff) and at the safe house. It was fun getting back into doing something a bit arty, but the enjoyment was lessened when I got so cold in the big warehouse that my lips turned blue and I could no longer feel my hands. After getting over the mild hypothermia, a day later, the stomach bug set in. Not much fun, but at least I wasn't in a dorm room in a backpackers at the time!
Once I recovered I joined a team of staff and 6 underprivileged kids for the second part of their marine week. The children had won a competition to come and stay at Rocky Road for a week and had many activities organised to learn about marine related things. The people running it work at Shamwari, which is the very exclusive game reserve attached to the Born Free foundation. Through a rather bizarre coincidence, we discovered that me and Abi (one of the organisers) had actually spoken before
Michael Jackson (AKA shank)
. She had been living in the UK last year and was the person who dealt with my booking for me coming to Rocky Road last time. We headed to Knysna for a day to spend a day on the salt marsh there. We were led by the old, nutty professor, who was thoroughly English and commonly used phrases such as "Right Ho" and "Chaps". He told Sam (one of the other RR volunteers) to have a good time when he "Got back into Blighty". He was also more than a bit hard of hearing. We followed him down from the petrol station to his lab, and half way through the journey, for reasons that never became clear, he turned on his hazard lights as he weaved down the rest of the road.
We all had great fun on the mud flats, they were covered in crabs and the kids loved it, even though they were terrified of them. At one point they were using the fishing nets to pole vault over the sand so that the crabs couldn't nip their toes! We headed back to the lab to examine what we had caught under the microscope. The prof decided to talk about one of the crabs on the microscope connected to the computer screen. When he tried to transfer it to the petri-dish the crab wasn't having it and made a break for it under the computer, despite the prof calmly telling it "No, thats not the idea at all"
Marine week
. Much commotion broke out for the next 10 minutes as we tried to poke the crab out of various crevices of very expensive high tech computer and science equipment (still remembering that most of the people there were scared of it!).After a KFC (accompanied by a loaf of bread, don't ask!) we headed to the beach. Some of the kids had never swam in the ocean (or at all) before that week, and the loved playing in the surf in the sun. I then decided to make a sandcastle with them, another first, and they lapped it up, even using their shoes as tools to smooth the sand. They enjoyed destroying it more though!
I was sorry to see the team leave, but I'll be seeing the Shamwari guys again next week as they have invited me and another volunteer to come and visit them for a few days, which I'm really looking forwards to.
