Habitat for Humanity (Last day in SA)

The last day in South Africa I had managed to buy a ticket to go to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. Evergreen already had a ticket so she and I along with about 16 other people loaded up on a bus with a sack lunch and were driven to a township to the north of Cape Town. It seemed to me that the township itself was small but the shanty town that surrounded it was huge. These tiny shack houses were stealing electricity from the township through many wires that were strung everywhere. The whole week groups of SAS students had been working on a house for one single woman and her three kids. The house already had a roof and all its cinderblock walls put up. We just filled in the gap between the walls and the roof with parts of cinderblocks and daga (a mixture of sand, concrete, and water). We mixed the daga using the Jacuzzi method. This involves mixing the dry ingredients on the floor with shovels before making a hole in them and filling that hole with water. Shovelful’s of daga are then taken and thrown on daga boards where people are working with the cinderblock pieces. Some others also oiled the wooden doors and painted the trimming around the roof. At 10am the woman to whom the house would belong made us tea and fat cakes. Fat cakes are like beignets without powdered sugar on them. You cut them in half so you can put jam on them. I didn’t put jam on mine because it was already really good. We ate our sack lunches around 12 and saved the leftovers that people didn’t want to eat to give to the preschool in the township later. At 1:00 we cleaned everything up so we could present the house to the woman. The house was locked up and we all stood in a circle outside and passed around the key and said some kind of blessing on the house. Then the key was given to the women who opened the door and invited us all in. Throughout the day we all wrote something in the front of a new bible, when we went inside the house we all stood in a circle again and did the same thing with this bible as we had done with the key outside. The woman thanked us all for helping build her new home. Before leaving the township we went back to the preschool where we gave the leftover food to the teachers to distribute and the kids sang for us. They were really cute. The drive back to the ship was silent.

Back at the ship we had 2 hrs before on-ship time so we hurriedly changed clothes and went to the mall (right next to the ship) and bought some snacks and supplies. Later that night, after we departed, we learned that our global studies teacher, Professor Sanchez, had a partially detached retina and was in surgery back in Cape Town and would be meeting the ship in Mauritius. So these past few days of global studies have been thrown together and throwing schedules off. It will hopefully get back on track fairly quickly after Mauritius. We were told yesterday that he went through two surgeries successfully and would definitely be back. In the meanwhile we have had one guest speaker, and will have another tomorrow.