30 August - Community Support

Fridays are great; it is the day we have a later start and a cooked breakfast. It is also the day we help in the community. Today we went a little further afield to a town called Colchester about an hour away from our lodge. There is a project here that helps provide children with a few basics while at the same time keeping the community tidy: once a week the children come to the school with bags of plastic and paper that they have collected and are given 'tokens' which they then swap for food and other basics that have been donated to the project. It clearly works as the local town of Alicedale is strewn with litter whereas Colchester is notably cleaner.

We travelled down after breakfast (and after rushing from breakfast to the border fence because someone had seen lions mating 100 yards from the lodge) and were given a rather rambling and confusing brief of our role by the woman that ran the project. Nevertheless we managed to get ourselves organised, one group in the shipping container that was the 'shop' where they guided the local children through, ensuring they swapped their 'tokens' for things other than sweets and toys, and the second group weighing and sorting the recycling into a second shipping container. I was in the second group and it became clear from the queue of people building up nearby, and the massive bags they had, that this was likely to be manic. And so it was. The kids came through, we weighed the recycling, we issued them tokens, we then sorted the plastics into massive bags, all the time trying to keep the place tidy. It was chaos, it was fast and it was very, very dirty; these were not bottles and tins that had been used in their homes, these had been picked up off the streets. After three hours it was over and the shared view of all was that we had done well against the odds and that it had been a sobering experience to witness the reality of these children's lives and needs. With those thoughts on our minds we headed to a nearby picnic spot for lunch and then home.

This evening we all went to the local pub. I had drummed up support and organised two taxis to take us and bring us back. I felt secure in that this week's mix was across the age divide and that I would not be led astray by the younger set. I had even organised an early taxi and a late one. I realised everything had gone wrong again when, despite having caught the early taxi as planned, I was still up and drinking at the lodge long after the late taxi had arrived and the occupants had gone to bed....