This weekend saw the annual charity walk organized by the Rotary Club of Mbabane Mbuluzi, this involved 3,300 people walking, running and singing their way up to the top of one of the world’s largest granite monoliths. It is kind of an interesting event in Swaziland as there isn’t really the culture of raising money for charity and generally when Swazi’s gets to the position where they don’t have to walk as a means of transport then they don’t do it for recreation. This meant for most of our Swazi colleagues who came on the walk, the fairly gentle 6km hike was quite a challenge!
I live just off the only road to the starting point of the walk, on a normal morning I’d see two or three cars go by, on the morning of Sibebe Survivor there was a constant stream of fully loaded cars, buses and kombies (minibus taxis) heading down towards the start. Mbabne is normally fairly quiet and we don’t really know what a traffic jam is, on the day of the walk there was a queue of traffic for about a kilometer before the start line and the parking area, it was great to see so many people out and participating in the event.
If you want to know some more about the event and what the money is used for this takes you to the Rotary Club webpage.
A colleague of mine, Laura, designed and made our team t-shirts at her screen printing class, below are photos of the team at the start of the walk and at the top of Sibebe.
Eric or ‘just the intern’ as he has been known to describe himself took on the job of carrying our snacks up the hill. Joe, who was organizing our team had very thoughtfully brought the snacks, but hadn’t thought through the container, he managed to pack them in a tub that wouldn’t fit into any of the rucksacks we had with us. Well done Eric for carrying the tub all the way up and down the hill!
Laura then hosted a Sibebe Funday at her house to reward the ‘survivors’ with a braai and fun and games including a bouncy castle, a three legged race, egg and spoon race….. Below is a very out of focus photo of one of the egg and spoon race heats. I think I was laughing so much I couldn't hold the camera steady, the course involved running down the garden, through the bouncy castle and then back to the top of the garden again, you really got to see peoples competitive sides coming out!
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