West Cape News

Steve Kretzmann

A small army of 950 Irish volunteers clad in bright t-shirts and hardhats and with white legs sticking out between their shorts and their boots, is determined to complete the building of 200 state subsidised houses within a week.

Divided into 15 teams designated by different bright colours – indicated by the t-shirts the volunteers wear – the building blitz organised by the charitable Niall Mellon Township Trust is almost military in it’s precision, even down to the stripes made up of an Irish and South African flag on the sleeves of the volunteers indicating how many building blitzes they’ve participated in.

But while the logistical precision of the operation and the ‘veteran stripes’ on the t-shirts may resemble the military, the smiles, gender and age mix of this unlikely army of builders unravels the metaphor.

A third of the Irish building army that trooped into Wallacedene township in the pouring rain on Sunday were women, and the volunteers’ ages range from 15 to 74-years-old. They also smile broadly with the knowledge and enjoyment of “making a difference”.

Each volunteer giving of their sweat, time and knowledge to build houses for people they have never met, but who live in shacks a stone’s throw from the new houses, has had to raise €5000 in the midst of a severe economic recession at home in order to work in the wind and the mud of a foreign country this week – this is no tourist trip.

And ask anyone of them why they’ve taken part, or, for some of them, why they undergo the tiresome task of raising funds and return year after year, and the same answer always crops up in various guises: “Because we’re making a difference.”

Although it’s a cliché, it rings true.

The Niall Mellon Township Trust has built 12 500 houses for South Africans across the country since it laid the first brick in Hout Bay seven years ago.

While this week’s building blitz is the eighth the trust has conducted, construction is not restricted to building blitz’s alone, they merely serve to give a twice-yearly oomph to the trust’s efforts.

Building houses in Gauteng, the Southern and Western Cape throughout the year, the trust employs 100 permanent staff and 2 000 subcontractors, and will in the end build, in partnership with the South African government, a total of 2,117 houses in Wallacedene, 600 of which have already been completed. – West Cape News