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.

When you travel to foreign countries it is inevitable that you will have plenty of new experiences and come to a deeper level of cultural understanding by trying new things and going out of your comfort zone. Trying bokdrol spoeg or kudu dung spitting when I was recently in Botswana hits all of these points!

Back in August I flew from Cape Town to southern Botswana to visit the staff and volunteers on our Conservation program for a couple of days. I was expecting to travel through a stunning landscape, see some wild animals and observe as much of this exciting new program as I could, all of which I was able to do. But I was not expecting bokdrol spoeg which is roughly translates as kudu dung spitting and within the Afrikaans community it is indeed considered a real sport.

On my first day after we finished lunch under this massive baobab tree (above) a perfect pile of dried kudu pellets was found and a game of bokdrol spoeg was suggested (Thanks a lot David!). The basic aim of the sport is to see who can spit a kudu pellet the farthest from behind a set line sort of like spitting cherry pits. But when the dust settled the volunteers and I were shown what amateurs we were by Gerrit, our Conservation Director, who won every game.

Anyone think this should be our next Sports placement? Any takers?

Harry Kent, our Desk Officer, showing his fine form in mid-spit

I recently returned from a visit to our programs in Cape Town, South Africa and the wild of Botswana, and while the projects are quite different they are also all equally amazing. Although the difference between a large cosmopolitan city and the bush of Botswana maybe quite obvious to some, the difference is most readily apparent by looking at the two different offices Projects Abroad maintains in Cape Town and the Legidimo region in Botswana.

Cape Town

Country Director, Dana Myers and Desk Officer, Alyssa Myers hard at work

Our office in South Africa is located in the Newlands suburb of Cape Town in a modern office building just blocks away from the famous Newlands Rugby and Cricket pitches and a pretty amazing view of the Table Mountain Range I dare say! Dana and Alyssa love visitors and volunteers are encouraged to drop by peruse all the helpful travel books, ask a question or just hang out. Then onto Botswana ………

Botswana

Harry Kent, our intrepid Desk Officer, in his “Legidimo office”!

Harry is the staff member responsible for corresponding and answering all the questions our Southern Africa Conservation volunteers have before they arrive. This is done primarily by email which requires internet, which is not easy to access in the bush! Consequently, Harry and Gerrit, our Conservation Director, drive 20 minutes up a hill to Harry’s “office” where the internet signal is the best. I would have to say Harry might have the best view of any Projects Abroad office! But watch out for the leopards!

I went on to Cape Town and met up with Dana Myers, who’s due to take over as Director for South Africa when he’s released by the American International School on 15 June.

Dana has a complex family history. He’s in his late twenties and has an interesting history, including working as a schoolteacher on the edge of a volcano in Hawaii – apparently, you had to be careful when you breathed in case you swallowed a bit of floating lava – amazing! Then he did his Masters at a university in Montana and joined one of our programmes. He’s ideal for the Cape Town job because he loves the city and also knows all about the background and expectations of Western volunteers (particularly, I suppose, if they happen to come from the edge of a volcano in Hawaii or from Montana).

Dana says that Cape Town is the most complete city he’s ever known (although, when you think that his experiences may be limited to Honolulu and Montana, this may not be saying much). But I can see what he means. Cape Town is a big cultural centre and is visually amazing with Table Mountain behind and a general feeling that the city is built on a series of narrow strips between a wild mountain range and the South Atlantic. For years and years, I was an anti-apartheid campaigner so it was great to see a complete racial mix in all the hotels, shopping malls, restaurants and so on – but depressing to see the dreary monoculture of the townships thirteen years after apartheid had been swept away. I am inclined to think that the Mbeki government has probably got the balance of positive discrimination about right, but it must be very tough for those who expected more and who are still living in poverty.

I did the usual placement tour and there are some really good ones. The Salesian School takes in street-children and is totally brilliant – “Salesian” as in monks from France and not “Silesian” as in coalmines in Poland. The print-journalism placement is at Cape Town’s own Big Issue – the editor is very energetic and he’s keen to have volunteers to do real broad-ranging and tough journalism in a new-look fast-expanding magazine.

The original inhabitants of Cape Town were bushmen. They’ve been battered over the centuries by the Portuguese, the Zulus, the Boers, and the British and they’ve retreated to the Kalahari. If you climb Table Mountain or go to the Cape of Good Hope, just look around and imagine what it would have been like if they had just been left alone…

Dr. Peter Slowe