Volunteers and staff ready to build!

A special thanks to our volunteers for giving up their sunny Saturday to help build homes for Habitat for Humanity in the Mfleni Township, a half hour drive from Cape Town city. Our team of ten volunteers started the work day with digging deep ditches to create the foundation for the house. It sure isn’t easy to dig a hole up to your knees, we soon found out! Nevertheless, we were able to get the job down before lunch. Now came the hard part, making concrete from scratch. This meant mixing sand, gravel, water and concrete powder by hand on the concrete and then quickly shoveling it into the foundation holes to dry.

Digging a foundation

Mixing cement

After a grueling day of work, some of the volunteers sat down with the locals and were able to try traditional South African beer called “umqombothi” (the “q” is a clicking sound). This beer has been home brewed all of South Africa, it is made with sorghum and millet mainly, then mixed with with maize meal, water and yeast and left to ferment, making it a beer rich in B vitamins. The taste isn’t as refreshing as a frosty cold pint you would find in an English pub, it is served at room temperature, or in our case, fairly warm in the midday sunshine, and tastes quite sour and thick!

The adventurous trying some umqombothi

We left that day hot, sore and with many blisters, but we couldn’t have felt better about helping the initial process to build a home for someone who has never really had a real home of his own for his family.

It is certainly an exciting time here at Projects Abroad! We are going to be working in 3(!) new countries in 2008 and I will be having a little contest shortly to tell you which countries they are. But right now we want to hear where you think we should work next? Which country would you like to volunteer in that we don’t already go to? Once the poll is done I will tell you my choice!

If you have a strong conviction about a certain country you can give us a shout in the comments section.

For those who don’t know, an English woman of 54, Gillian Gibbons, Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days imprisonment in Sudan for calling a teddy bear “Mohammed”. It is obviously utterly wrong and now she has been “pardoned”. The poor woman meant well and just made a silly mistake. Nobody said anything until it was much too late.

I have been on Sky TV, BBC News24 and BBC1 to explain that it’s much better for people to do volunteering with a good organisation like Projects Abroad. I explained that we provide online briefing, personal briefing by phone, email and online networking from colleagues in the destination country, an induction on arrival, and careful monitoring and mentoring which would have certainly have stopped something like this getting out of hand. I’ve also explained that we don’t go to countries like Sudan where travel is dangerous and the human rights record non-existent.

All this has given me an insight into Rupert Murdoch’s slick Sky TV station, the fairly smooth BBC TV headquarters where I was on the Breakfast Show. When I went on News 24, though, I only had to go to our local run-down BBC studio in Brighton. There, a nice woman gets you a cup of tea and explains that the engineer went home at 5 o’clock and she can’t quite get the sound working but it’ll be OK when the time comes. It was. About a minute before I was due to go on, a voice comes over a loudspeaker saying “This is Tunbridge Wells! This is Tunbridge Wells!” At that point they stick something in your ear and off you go. Or almost. A frantic phone call from London – “You’ve got 75 seconds to change the backdrop – this is going out live – it’s night and the backdrop is broad daylight!”. After some scrabbling, they found a rolled-up poster of Brighton by night which they put up as the backdrop. Then, with about 10 seconds to go, the poster rolled itself up again with a scrunching sound. At the very last second, a studio-hand managed to hold it in place, and you might be able to see her finger-nails if you look very closely at the stills. And we used to have the world’s leading broadcasting service!