Day 2 - On site

Saturday 3rd-

Our buses left the hotel at 8am to take us to 'The Arches', a marquee set up for the week to act as our meeting point (and pub!) for the week.
Here we heard "Welcome to Capetown" for the first time of the week, listened to Niall, Hugh Brennan (CEO) and others tell us about the week we were about to embark on. They told us it would be extraordinary, they told us time and time again. But I know that I for one could never be prepared for the events of the next 7 days.

That morning on it's own was rather an experience, it was a very proud morning, here were we 1,380 people all here to do the one thing all because of one's man's mission. We all took on his mission and made it ours and we were all so very proud of each other.

After being introduced as best we could be to the task ahead and the people around us, we were sent to the 28 buses ready to take us to Freedom Park, Mitchell's Plain, an area in the Capeflats. It is a coloured township 40km outside of Capetown.

Capetown is a fantastically modern and clean city. However, the buses quickly transported us to a whole other world where all we could see for miles and miles was wasteland and shacks. Shack after shack made from whatever material was available on whatever land was available. Some were larger than others but most are little more than 3m by 3m.

When we arrived at the township the buses stopped and we joined the rest of our workmates to make the journey to site.
All along the route, it seemed like hundreds and thousands of locals had come to wish us well. Flags, posters, banners and even babies were held up to us in welcome! It wasn't sunny, it was windy and it was cold. Each idea I had about South Africa was challenged and changed by the minute.

But the smiling welcoming faces and shouts and songs of the locals all around us surprised me as much as anything. Several faces and banners kept reappearing as we made our way towards the site, they were running ahead time and time again to make sure we saw and heard them and understood how they felt. Choruses of thank you's resounded all around as we shook hands and waved - we might as well have been royalty!

And to a certain extent, that was what we were for the week. These overwhelmingly grateful people consider us to be little less than saints for the work we undertook for the week. To a family who have lived in a shack for the last ten years, we were helping to provide a way out to a safer, cleaner, warm, dry home where they could plan for a future without the real threat of fires everyday of their lives as well as all the other horrible difficulties they face on a daily basis.

So we got to site and found the containers and houses we had been allocated for the week. There were 60-70 people per team and 17 teams altogether. The plumbers, electricians and gardeners were each on a team of their own as well as most of the painters. Then the rest of us were then split into teams and given a colour. I was on the lemon team, and what a bunch of lemons we were! Some of the most fantastic people I have had the pleasure to meet without a shadow of a doubt.

So we all got stuck in, I was on container duty for that afternoon - which in all reality did not involve much graft... There were materials and tools in each container and at that point in time it was just a case of trying to figure out what we had and what we needed.

But on an average of about 4 hours sleep the night before, the work completed by everyone on that first day was nothing short of incredible.