An South African experience

When we, Ronja Malachowska and Katharina Stark went to high school we decided that we wanted to go to Africa and work with children. We started to look for organizations that need volunteers on the internet but we could not find anything that suited us. Katharina started to talk to her teacher; Gunilla about her plans and Gunilla told her that she just had come home from a global school trip to South Africa where she had met some wonderful people. On that trip she visited an organization called Ziphakamise and they also had a childrens home. Gunilla told us to e-mail Lynne Footit from Ziphakamise and ask her if we could come and work at the childrens home (Emseni) starting from August 2008.

Lynne told us that we could not come before the beginning of 2009 because they just received their first Swedish volunteer (Ulrika Ronmark) ever who also had gotten in touch with them trough twinning.


We stayed in touch with Lynne and finally decided to go to South Africa, Port Shepstone in the end of February 2009 and to stay there for six months.

When we arrived in Port Shepstone we got a great welcoming from Lynne Footit, Sarah Pearce and all of Emseni (they had even made some Swedish cakes for us).

Our time in South Africa has been like a roller coaster. We have had so many different feelings and so many crazy experiences but the one thing that we will remember the most from our time here are all the amazing people that we have met in this beautiful country.

We did not know a lot about South Africa before we came here and in the beginning everything was very strange to us and we are sure that we seemed very strange to everybody here. It was very hard for us to see all poverty here, I am sure that everybody who has ever been to Sweden knows that we live in a very protected environment and that we don not know much about “the real world”. Nerveless it was amazing to see how much hope there is, how caring people are and how great their faith in God is.

Our South African experience is something that will stay with us forever. It has made us grow and taught us more than we could ever imagine.

Everybody has been so great to us. We are so amazed over how nice people, who barely know us have been to us. For example one time when we had just arrived in Port Shepstone and walked to town Gulshera saw us and gave us a lift even though we had only met her once, maybe that is not a big deal in South Africa but in Sweden these kinds of things happen very seldom.

Even though there seems to be a great lack of structure here and the “african” time can drive us poor Swedes crazy from time to time we have discovered that people here realize something very important. People here seem to know that we need each other, something that unfortunately many people in Sweden have forgotten all about..

It is almost time for us to go back to Sweden and now it is up to us to tell other people about South Africa and hopefully we can convince some of them to come here and to experience some of the blessings that we have experienced here.

Last of all we would like to say thank you to everybody that we have met here, you have all taught us a lot. We would like to say a special thanks to Lynne Footit who has been a great mentor to us.

Best wishes!

Katharina Stark and Ronja Malachowska