While on our year abroad, Madeline and I want to look at ways that we can give back in some small way for our privileged position of being able to take a year off for a “family sabbatical”. When booking accommodations and tours, we try to make the majority with local people/companies so that funds go directly to the communities, particularly in the impoverished areas we visit. Still, we want to give more than just our dollars which started us down the path of looking for volunteer opportunities as a family along the way.
Great we want to volunteer. Now try and find a place with the sales pitch: “Hi, we want to help, but have two toddlers that will need constant supervision and may have a meltdown at any moment. Oh, and if we could have off between 1pm and 4pm so they can nap, that would be great”. Despite all these constraints, Madeline worked her magic to land us a prospect in Zimbabwe for a week with Greenline Africa, and it ended up being a highlight of our travel so far.
Here’s our podcast for the week!
Where Are We?
Our travels continue in Africa with a week of volunteering in Zimbabwe near Victoria Falls, followed by briefly visiting the Falls before driving to Botswana to see the Chobe River and associated wildlife. Truthfully, both Madeline and I were stressed coming in to this stretch of our travel having just spent an enjoyable but exhausting two weeks in Namibia. Not only did we need a “vacation from our vacation”, but we had limited information about what our volunteering would actually entail or even where we would be sleeping for the week. For two, Type A planners, this is peak un-comfort levels.
Things got off to an inauspicious start, when we missed our connecting flight in Johannesburg coming from Namibia, but improved as soon as we got to Victoria Falls and met our guide, Bongo, at arrivals. Over the course of volunteering, we visited the local pre-schools in the morning and at Emmett’s nap time, Madeline and I sorted through book donations while Mae played outside with another Greenline employee, Flatter, for hours. We came out of our time there with new perspectives and unexpectedly refreshed.
After saying so long to our new friends, we spent a few days exploring the town of Victoria Falls and seeing the namesake water feature. The Falls were stunning, as expected, and hiking in the “rain” created by the cascading water while the sun shone overhead was a surreal experience. The town itself felt touristy but quaint, and we enjoyed our many walks through the neighborhoods.
Finally, our travels took us an hour west along a pot-hole filled road and one of the strangest border crossings ever to Botswana. From the town of Kasane we were able to take river boat safaris along the Chobe River to see more unforgettable wildlife scenes in Africa. We concluded our travels with a delayed flight and missing a SECOND CONNECTION in Johannesberg on our way back to Cape Town, South Africa. Lesson learned: don’t fly through Johannesberg (or have at least a 3 hour layover for international connections).
Volunteering in Zimbabwe
To find a volunteer opportunity, Madeline started where every person in the 21st century goes when they don’t know something: Google. After several iterations of search terms, she found a website called Conservation Travel Africa which in turn led her to several family projects listed there. The key was to obviously find a place that would allow a 2 and a 4 year old to join, but also find one where we actually contributed versus it being volunteering for an Instagram worthy picture.
I’m happy to say that we found just what we were looking for when we connected with Greenline Africa, 25km outside of Victoria Falls in the rural area of Huange, Zimbabwe. Greenline Africa is focused broadly on helping women and youth in the rural areas of Zimbabwe for the betterment of the communities. They do a variety of projects depending on the current need. Some example projects are providing 1000s of bikes for school kids to access the long distances to school, building new schools, establishing water access to rural areas, distributing vaccines, and teaching local families methods for a sustainable homestead. With a wide range of projects, as a volunteer, what you work on while there depends on your skillset.
For our volunteer week with the kids, we focused on supporting the Early Childhood Development (ECD) classrooms, which is for children from 3 to 5 years of age. Each day, we would wake up, load book and toy donations and ride out to one of the locations. One of us would play with the kids while the other helped cook their breakfast and lunch until noon, when they were dismissed. At several locations, it was one teacher to ~30 children with one of the mothers volunteering her time to cook huge pots of breakfast corn porridge and sadza (thicker corn porridge) for lunch over an open fire.
Emmett and Mae got the most attention and were shy at first, but as soon as the teacher started in on a song or activity they just became another toddler, happy to be there. Worlds apart, a good catchy song with some hand motions can go a long way. A few of our favorite memories are Mae being the center of attention on the seesaw with everyone wanting to take a turn with her and Emmett joining in on a lesson in how to play rugby (yes, as a two year old) at one of the schools.
While our kids acclimated, Madeline used her old camp counselor skills to teach new games and songs. The Bananas Song and associated dance (I apologize for this earworm) were a huge hit. I focused my energy on building the most epic car ramps from spare timber for some donated wood cars toys. We both helped fetch water, make lunch and wash “dishes”, which were usually reused food packaging like yogurt or butter tubs. Each school was unique in setting, teacher and future donation needs, but they were universally loving places with teachers and volunteers helping give these young kids a sense of routine, engagement and a warm meal.
As I mentioned before, Greenline aims to leverage their volunteers’ skills and experience in their supporting activities but apparently aerospace engineering isn’t a leading need in rural villages. What Madeline and I do have, though, are our organizational skills, which we put to good use by cleaning out the warehouse of donated books and toys for the schools. We sorted through 1000s of books and organized them by age and category to allow for the right books to reach the right groups of students. A local Greenline employee, Lenmore sorted with us and we had a lot of fun recommending books we’d both read as kids back and forth (Redwall Series anyone?) and deciding whether Encyclopedias from 1943 (seriously someone donated these) were too out dated since Zimbabwe wasn’t even a country in that year.
The blog so far talks a lot about what our family did, but the truth is we were just an accessory to the larger effort undertaken by the Greenline team. Bongo was our guide and constant companion throughout, staying on-site with us, driving us everywhere and leading our day-to-day activities. He was from the community and his passion and desire to help others was contagious. Lenmore and Victor both helped with odd jobs around the Greenline Center, including management of the large garden field where teens would come learn how to garden on the weekends. Flatter was the house manager for the home/community center we stayed in and was Mae and Emmett’s best friend. She played “house” for hours with Mae, baking “cakes”, celebrating “birthdays” and generally pretending to be whatever Mae wanted her to be. Finally we got to have a wonderful dinner with two of the trustees, Veronica and Charlene and hear about their inspiring history and efforts over the decades to make their home country of Zimbabwe a better place for all.
At the end of the week, we were all sad to say our goodbyes. The school outreach had been rewarding and a benefit of us visiting five different pre-schools was we brought a fresh set of eyes to the needs of each one. Before dropping us off at our hotel in Victoria Falls, we had Bongo take us to the local market where we bought out the store of plates, spoons and stationary ($120 for everything) so that kids could eat their extremely hot porridge with actual utensils. Our book sorting ended up being probably the best thing we did for the organization in that they could now get those donations to the right age group for them.
Do I think a single week of our family’s time in rural Zimbabwe radically improved the community? On its own, probably not, but the true value lies in our family’s growth and view of volunteering as well as us sharing the experience with you all. We certainly would not have known about Greenline before this and plan to support them in any way we can going forward. I also know that we will volunteer/donate more than we have in the past because of this experience and maybe inspire others to as well. In that way, the ripple effect of a single week can grow in to something more impactful.
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Before concluding our journey in Zimbabwe, we stayed for a few nights in the town of Victoria Falls. The town itself is fairly small, and exists mainly for the Falls, with lots of tourist trinket shops and restaurants to visit. We got sticker shock with prices for food being higher than even what we would pay back home in Seattle. Our two nights ended up being the perfect amount of time to see the highlights, but people with older kids, or no kids, could stay longer to do the extreme sports and boat booze cruises as well.
We stayed within walking distance of the falls and felt very safe walking around the town at day. We got haggled a few times to buy 100 Trillion, you read that right Trillion, Zimbabwean dollar bills from their hyper inflation period (worth $0 now), but otherwise everyone was friendly. At night, it’s not recommended to travel by foot on account of the wild animals able to roam into town. We took a taxi a few times for under $5 USD.
On to the Victoria Falls itself, it really was as grand as it was hyped up to be. We chose to enter on the Zimbabwe side, which is pricey for tourists at $50 per adult and $25 per kid, but that does get you easy access to bathrooms, restaurants and a stroller-able path. The Zambia side is cheaper, but less built out and the views during the drier, winter season aren’t as good. After being in the deserts of Namibia and rural Zimbabwe, the tropical area surrounding the Falls was a stark contrast. The spray from the massive Falls basically creates its own rainforest sub climate and we ended up soaked after a few hours in the area, despite wearing rain jackets. Overall the park and paths through it were really fun, with each lookout yielding an indescribable view of another stunning area of Africa.
Chobe, Botswana
An hour drive west of Victoria Falls is Chobe National Park in Botswana, yielding yet another chance to see elephants on our travels. We booked a transfer which included the border crossing. The drivers and vans operate only in their respective countries, so we got out of the first van in Zimbabwe, went through customs, threw our bags over a toll gate into Botswana and loaded into a new van with a new driver. Botswana was also protecting against the spread of hoof and mouth disease for cattle so all of our footwear had to be sterilized as well. Super fun pulling out ALL of the shoes buried in our bags.
As our home base in the region, we stayed in the town of Kasane, which is the jumping off point for both land and boat based safaris into Chobe National Park. While the main draw of the town was access to the park, it still felt geared to everyday life vs a tourist center, which gave us a general good vibe. Walking around we didn’t feel targeted as people to buy overpriced trinkets or an easy overpriced taxi ride and could just walk around and interlope as we pleased. A highlight was eating at the Pizza Plus Coffee & Curry, great name, while watching a warthog that had wandered in to town eating shrubs on the side of the road.
The morning after our transfer from Zimbabwe, we woke up early ready to hit the river to see the famed massive elephant herds and fantastical river crossings of these majestic beasts. We elected for the morning to avoid the crowds and because the kids generally do better in earlier excursions versus post nap timeframe. We were one of only a handful of boats out on the serene morning waters of the Chobe River. Seeing the hippos were a highlight, and seeing them in the river was fascinating and honestly a bit intimidating. They were both pretty defensive whenever we approached and the speed with which they could disappear under water and reappear much closer was unsettling. Unfortunately, after 3.5 hours of slowly trolling the river we didn’t see a single elephant.
Returning to our accommodations, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed since Chobe is known for elephants. The kids were tired, we were tired and both parties agreed that +3hrs on a boat was not the most enjoyable outing. So what did we do? We talked to our hosts and signed up for another +3 hr boat safari at sundown that evening because YOLO and elephants. Our gamble paid off, and we saw a mom and her two babies cross the river at sunset. Our guide for the evening safari was also more personable and took our “order” for what animals we wanted to see before we left and did his best to get us up close and personal with them. While Madeline and I would have preferred to get a little less “personal” with the crocodiles, the kids loved it, and it made the second outing totally worth it.
Closing
Thanks for reading anyone, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions about our experience volunteering with little ones! We are heading back to Cape Town, South Africa in the locally named “Deep South” for three weeks as we slow things down for a bit.
Love these updates. What a wonderful time.
What an incredible journey! I can tell from reading this that the volunteering really took the cake in terms of experiences. It will be marked on your heart and brains always! Thanks for taking the time to share it with all of us back home. Love you all lots and you are making us proud!