Building Hope

So you may or may not have noticed I have fallen a bit behind in my posts. This post reflects the events of 2 weekends ago. This past weekend I went to Durban and hope to complete a post about that shortly. Two weekends ago I was meant to go to Swaziland to visit my friend Emmanuel. I was very disappointed that after an hour of driving around and trying to find the bus station I missed my minibus to Swaziland and then got yelled at about how it was too dangerous to take a minibus to Swaziland alone as a white woman. I normally would have brushed this off, as I do many things (such as cycling through sunny side 3 times a week) that people don't think a white woman should do. However, on this occasion I had a bit of a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach so I begrudgingly missed my trip. But as they say when a door closes a window opens.

As it happened the night that I was supposed to leave the ISS had its annual function which was nice to attend, although uneventful. However, on Saturday I joined a group of 4 others from my commune and about 16 other relatively young people to help build a shack for a man in need. Early Saturday morning we got up and traveled in a rented minibus to a Township in North West Province. We met the young man who we would be building the house for outside an orphanage where he worked in the cresch. We then went over to the plot where the shack would be built. It was immediately clear that the land would need to be leveled where we were building the shack as there were mounds of dirt, grass and garbage on the property. So the next hour and a half about half of us, including me, pulled grass from its roots, picked up trash and hacked away at the soil until the job was done. Meanwhile some of the others (mostly men) used power tools to build the roof. We then put up the frame and roof and then started putting in the walls. The whole task took about 6 hours. It was very humbling to see someone so happy to receive a residence which was smaller than a typical Canadian spare bedroom as their entire house. Even more humbling was that 20 relative strangers came together to build the house for him.

While I was at the building site I also had the opportunity to meet some of the locals. For most of the day several children curiously watched as we built the shack. The 2 oldest, both boys spoke English and came up to talk with us, but the young little girls kept their distance. After a lull in the work I walked over and started talking with the children, whose English wasn't very good (or in the cases of the really young ones non existent. They speak Tswana. After playing jump rope with the little girls their mothers came out to meet us. This gave us the opportunity to understand life in townships and get to know the community a little bit better. The really nice part about this was that once I went over to play with the little girls, others followed me and palyed to while others still went about meeting some of the other adults in the community. After a long day we turned the keys over to the new owner and went home, with a happy sense of fulfillment.

The next day when my plans fell through to go to a nature reserve with a dam with the group who I lived with, I took matters into my own hands and decided to cycle to a nature reserve with walking paths where you can literally walk up to animals. I checked the route on google maps and hopped on my bicycle and headed for the Groenkloof nature reserve, which Google informed me was 10.9 km away. Unfortunately Google lied to me about where the entrance was an I wound up on a regional highway with large trucks passing me at full speed. After realising my mistake I turned around but I had already gone a half hour out of my way. This little adventure landed me with a major sunburn on my nose. Once safely in the reserve I ate my lunch and decided to walk the trails rather than cycle. I initially got lost and ended up walking the bike path rather than the foot path but I found my way in the end. Sadly, the only animals I saw this day were a heron and some Guinea Fowl in addition to some butterflies. The first time I went to this reserve I walked right up to a zebra, saw giraffes and a wildabeast but inevidtably left my camera at home. In the end I walked about 5 km that day and cycled about 20. It was a good day of fresh air and exercise!