Accommodation
Welcome to the beautiful Cape Town, South Africa where we spent the next 8 weeks of our travel and volunteer adventure. Our accommodation was with a South African host family, where we lived in the southern suburbs of Cape Town in Grassy Park, and was the place we called “home” while performing our volunteer building assignment. We felt very lucky to have such a wonderful host family and accommodation - the Benjamin’s were always there when we needed them and super at accommodating for us when we asked to park our rental car on their property and when we asked to use their kitchen for cooking and hosting Thanksgiving dinner for 12 of our friends. It was so easy and nice to live with such a great family. We not only shared our accommodation with the 6 members of the Benjamin family, but we also had up to 7 other housemates from various parts of the world, most of which we traveled with on weekends for day trips and enjoyed many great times together.
The Building Project
Every workday we would get picked up and taken to our work site, in the informal settlement of Village Heights located within Lavender Hill in the Cape Town flats. Our work place was located behind the house of a resident of Village Heights from which they were operating a daycare. The partnership Projects Abroad had with Gift of Hope and the Zandvlei Trust was for the volunteers to build a community center for the children to have a safe and productive learning environment, and to be a place (in the future) for members of the community to come for classes - an exciting project by itself, but it was also selected as a featured project in that helped make Cape Town the World Design Capital of 2014. The project began 4 years ago and the volunteers before us had built a library, a classroom, a playground, and had added running water for a bathroom facility. We were asked to spend our time building the walls for another room, and adding a drainage system for clearing the rain water from the structures that will utilize the water for a garden expansion.
For the most part each day was spent mixing sand and concrete, digging and plastering - we became fine cement technicians and excellent plaster finishers! To add to the excitement of our work day, in any one day we had between 10 and 20 children on the building site, which, added to the fact that we were located between the Village Heights settlement and the Zandvlei Nature Reserve, our days involved seeing the hardships of life living in one of the poorest communities in Cape Town; the gang related activities in the settlement areas that impacted our work schedules; and the government’s interest in ensuring the informal settlement remained “informal” - no permanent structures are allowed - as well as their keen interest in the great work that was being done by volunteers for the people of this community; all in addition to our building work. Our project supervisor was instrumental in keeping all of these outside influences in check while also providing us his wonderful guidance and leadership as we continued to complete this partnership vision. Above all else we had a great and wonderful time on the building site. Our supervisor, teammates, the care givers, Macy (the dog on site) and yes, even all of the children made this hard working volunteer assignment a fun and fulfilling experience. We were very lucky that the last day of our assignment was the holiday party and graduation for a few of the children who would be going onto primary school in January. The party made it a fun celebratory day, but leaving the assignment and our supervisor, our teammates, and the children, who made us feel like family was more difficult than we ever imagined. We will truly miss our South African host family, housemates, our project supervisor, our work teammates and all those involved in developing the Gift of Hope.