What else can I say about my 2 months spent in Limpopo South Africa other than fantastic, awesome and brilliant!

From the moment we landed in Phalaborwa I knew it was going to be an amazing experience, well how many airports can you spot leopards in the Kruger National Park as you circle the runway? The airport was great; it looked more like a safari lodge than an airport, with its wildlife and water features.

We’d hardly time to unpack before we were introduced to the school, that very same evening that we landed. Ebert Le Roux, the primary school headmaster took us to Khanyisa where about 40 grade 6 learners were doing a leadership weekend. My first impressions of Khanyisa were – wow how well behaved these kids are! They have much more respect for their teachers than English kids do. Over the 2 months at Khanyisa I found that this is a two-way thing – the teachers also have more respect for their learners. The relationship between pupil and teacher is much better than you have in England so the school is a happy place!

 I always knew that South Africans were renowned for being relaxed, but wow not this relaxed! We discovered this on our first proper day at Khanyisa were the teacher casually say – “oh Debbie has got to go somewhere we need someone to cover her class. When does her class start? About 5 minutes ago?”

So we spent the first couple of days covering teacher’s lessons, seeing how the school ran and exploring the grounds, which enabled us to get to know some of the kids immediately.

With the sports activities mainly in the afternoon at Khanyisa, we had to fill the morning with other things. Helen took charge of swimming lessons with the grade 00/00s (yes, that is 3 year olds, crazy I know) to grade 2s with me and Ellie assisting. We decided to concentrate on the grade 1 classes with our other activities. Whilst Ellie helped them with their English and reading me and Helen would play in the jungle gym with them, I mean work on their balance, co-ordination and team skills. Of course we let them play but you learn through play as well.

We did catching, throwing, balancing on the balancing beam and then got them to learn the idea of taking turns, instead of having 6 of them scrambling up a ladder and ending up in the heap at the bottom! Then 2 mornings a week we would take the whole class to the field and work on teamwork. That really did need 3 of us! Boys won’t pass to girls and vice versa and they sometimes struggle with following instructions. But that was all part of the challenge. In the last week I was there our work did seem to have paid off as me and Ellie set up an obstacle course relay race for one of the grade 1 classes which worked really well.

Khanyisa is a private school with about 700 hundred students. It is very well off for the area of Giyani (however nothing like our private schools in England). It’s a fantastic school; it is set in lovely peaceful surroundings. Just across the road from the school is the Man’Ombe nature reserve where you can see giraffes, zebra and many impala, buck and kudu. This is great to walk around or you could just watch the cattle that roam freely in and out of the school gates!

However we were not just here to work at Khanyisa. One of our main aims was to get involved with outreach projects in the poorer schools around Giyani. We visited 3 primary schools over 6 sessions during each week, where I coached football, Helen netball, Dennis cricket and Ellie drama. These schools have no or very limited sports equipment so we take what we have from Khanyisa out to them so they can use it.

The children at these schools are even more amazed and overjoyed to see us than those at Khanyisa. They find the phrase ‘how are you’ the funniest thing, well, apart from when you speak Xitsonga and say ‘wa penga’ (not spelt like that I’m sure, but it means ‘you’re crazy’) and their favourite, ‘na ku rhandza’ (I love you)!

They speak very limited English so communication is difficult, but in the end sport speaks in one language. The teachers at these schools are typically South African, sitting under a tree in the shade watching when they could be helping to translate. It was a challenging but very rewarding experience and the schools really appreciated what we had to offer. The children really deserve a chance to play sport.

The house – what can I say? It wasn’t luxury but we didn’t expect that. It was however clean (until we’d finished with it!), spacious and had everything you could require in a house – water, electricity, cooker, fridge etc. Or so we thought! Not long after we arrived our air-conditioning unit broke, the fridge broke and then the water stopped working for 5 days. But this is normal in Giyani. If you were told in England that there would be no water in the entire town for 4 days, there’d be a mad rush to buy bottled water, but in Giyani everyone just carries on as normal. It makes you realise that you take water for granted!

Really, the house is quite nice and the area Kremetart is good to live in. The house is alarmed and you have a panic button on the key for the armed response. It all sounds a bit scary when you say it like that, but these are just precautions that Travellers takes for your safety. Kremetart is an extremely safe place to live and Giyani seems very safe as well, you very rarely hear of any crime.

Just opposite the house is the sports field where we spent our Friday nights, or should I say, evenings (nights are spent somewhere else in Kremetart which I will get on to later!). Friday evening is Kremetart sports club, here we invited all the local kids to come and play sport. While Helen and Ellie usually entertained the little ones I played football with the older lads, usually with some of the teachers from Khanyisa.

Now there’s not much to do in Giyani so of course we had to visit the only pub, which luckily for us happened to be in Kremetart. Snoopy, as it is known, is a great place to spend your evenings especially when you don’t like cooking. They offer great value meals from toasted sandwiches to steaks and the drinks are so cheap as well. Everyone here is friendly and we soon got to know Jessie behind the bar and Franz who insisted on giving us free shots on our first night. Some great nights started at Snoopy and usually ended watching shooting stars on top of a bakkie [pick-up truck]! Awesome!

Giyani is definitely a strange place. They were building a brand new shopping mall next to run down shops and market stall – very surreal! Although it’s not a bad place to live, there are so many beautiful places nearby to spend your weekends. We were lucky enough to have a couple of great friends that took us to Mpumalanga province where we saw the awesome sights of God’s Window, Blyde Canyon, Bourke’s Luck potholes and Mac Mac Falls. These are amazing sights that you must see if you are around the area and it makes you want to travel and see more of South Africa!

Of course you cannot go to Limpopo without going to the Kruger National Park! This was another fantastic weekend away. Although it wasn’t a the best season for the animals (it was too hot at 40 degrees), we still saw elephants, buffaloes, zebra, warthog, hippos, impala, buck, giraffe and even lions from a distance. We also got the chance to go on a night time safari, which was cool if you like holding a torch and being everyone’s spotlight for 2 hours!

The only public transport around the area are taxis, but not like English taxis. One they are cheap and two they cram about 15 people into tiny minibuses. But this is the only way of getting around without a car, so we went on a mini adventure to Hazyview were we went to the Kruger again and tasted traditional Shangaan life, a really amazing experience. Getting public transport really shows you how friendly people are, ensuring that we got the front seats in our minibuses and instructing us where to go when we got off, or was it just because we were two white girls?!

What a fantastic 2 months, I’m going to try and select the best moments but there are two many! One would have to be the success of the Cricket World Cup. As the real world cup was close we made our own Khanyisa Cricket World Cup, splitting 140 kids into the 8 main teams and getting them to research their country, produce a presentation and take part in a mini cricket tournament. It was an educational 3 days as well as good fun, producing much rivalry, especially when England made the final, not that we were biased, but when else will they reach the world cup final!

 I suppose it is also the little  moments that make it so special, especially at the outreach schools. Seeing the excitement in the kids faces when they rush to their classroom windows as you drive through the school gates and then when they bell goes they run out of the doors to welcome you. Trying to explain the offside rule to a bunch of Xitsonga girls and they don’t understand but then they understand the important line ‘I’m leaving today’ and ask you for hugs and say they will miss you.

We have given so much to these schools just by providing them with sports equipment to play with and I have got so much back .It has been a very rewarding couple of months and I didn’t want to leave!! I’m now thinking how I can get back.

I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone, just make sure you travel afterwards. My only regret is that I didn’t.

My friend David Reese and I began our project at the start of October 2006 and it lasted approximately 2 months through to the end of the summer term we had an excellent time.

Under the instruction of both Mr LeRoux and Mr Webber, we spent a significant amount of time at Khanyisa coaching the kids how to swim. They were at first fairly intimidated by the water; my having been led to believe that African culture denotes that the capability of swimming is not something passed down through the generations, there only being say a dozen half decent swimmers between the ages of 4 and 16, (the years that we were directed to work with).