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.