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Girls’ Guide to Guiding – Part 3

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February 3, 2014
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February 18, 2014

Girls’ Guide to Guiding – Part 3

Posted by: Melissa Van Rooyen

Girls’ Guide to Guiding Pt.3

Often when I chat to guests, they say to me, “living here must be amazing you are so lucky”. I always tell them that living here is incredible and I wouldn’t change it for all the Tea in China, but it certainly has its challenges….. These conversations always take me back to when I moved into the area over 8 years ago. I moved here with my boyfriend (now my husband J) with absolutely no idea of what I was getting myself into. In my mind I thought, we’ve spent many family holiday’s camping and “roughing it”, I am sure I could do this…. and yes I could ‘do this’, this living in the bush far from everyone and everything, but hell… I had a few things to learn. 

The first thing I learnt was that waking up to crashing glass in the middle of the night does not mean all is doomed. My first night on a game reserve was filled with excitement, anticipation and relief from this new adventure that Ivor and I had embarked on. Falling asleep that night was not easy, but finally I did, not sure where exactly I was in this place called Zululand. I was awoken a few hours later to the sound of crashing glass. I lay in bed frozen with fear. I nudged Ivor, he would correct me to more like kicked him, to find out if he had heard the same thing and to make sure he was ready to save me. Ivor slowly dragged himself out of bed, and staggered to a window and shouted “Kwezi stop that you fool!”… Kwezi? What? Who? My mind was racing with questions. Kwezi, as it turns out, was a hand reared Rhino that had just used our window as a scratching post which had promptly broken. So yes he did ‘save me’ from a Rhino who more thought of herself as a big dog… Here I sit 8 years after having survived my first night and ‘wildlife encounter’, loving my life!