For my month in Swaziland I worked at a care point called Thulwane a majority of the time. For the first few days that I worked there about20 kids showed up between the ages of 3 and 14, there was also 4 racers who would go and play with the kids. For the most part we would play a somewhat organized game with the kids, but we would never fully know the rules because the games were always Swazi and no one at the care point spoke good enough English to tell us the rules. So for the most part we would just play along with the game.
A week after arriving to Swaziland and after spending a few times at the care point school started for the older kids. Al of the kids from the ages of 6 and above were no longer coming to the care point in the morning, the time that we would be there. As well as having most of the kids no longer attending less racer were going, we started with 4 racers going and then dropped to 3 and finally in the end it was only Bea and I who went. It was alright that less racers went though because now we were playing with kids the ages of 3 to 5 and there was between 3 and 8 kids that would show up.
Since all of the older kids had left and only the young ones remained we stopped playing any sort of organized game. For instance, one of the days I climbed one of the trees and sat in the tree for around an hour while two little boys threw bark at me and tried to hit me. Another day we played music and danced with the kids for a while. I enjoyed my time the most with the younger kids, it was only after the older kids had left that the younger kids really approached us, and once they did approach us the clung to us. We don’t know anything about their lives at home but it seemed like the let all of their worries away when they were at the care point with us. They would run up and grab us and just hold on, if we were sitting they would crawl into our laps and just sit or lay there.
It was the young kids that I will miss the most. Not the ones who were the most fun to play with, not the ones the you could talk with in any sort of manner. No, it was the ones that were innocent, that ran to you like you were their last hope. Even though we couldn’t talk with each other, it didn’t meant that there wasn’t any communication. Their actions communicated that the felt protected by us, that they felt cared for, and that they felt loved, for what may be the first time in their lives.
