New beginnings

Home from home

I arrived in Cape Town, rand in hand, completely exhausted. I don't usually go abroad and expect there to be a 32 degree change in temperature but there I was in the baking heat after leaving snow behind - thank goodness!

Dramatic would be an understatement to describe the scenery here - everywhere is framed by towering mountains with atmospheric low cloud resting on their tips. I'm doing a fantastic job of being a typical tourist, whipping my camera out at every opportunity, even a trip to the local spar supermarket...It's just so beautiful everywhere! 

The drive from the airport went past lush vineyards, beautiful houses and glimpses of the sparkling coastline. We drove right over the mountain ridge into the town of Grabouw, which presented a very different picture. This region is made up of some government built concrete buildings (in very high demand) but otherwise comprises informal settlements and squatter camps with tin and wood shacks. From a distance these townships look quite picturesque, all jostled together, painted in candy colours with a scattering of trees, but up close, rubbish is strewn everywhere, the shacks are very cramped and clean water pumps are sparse.

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The most notable thing about this area and one of the main forms of employment here are the numerous fruit orchards that are scattered throughout the region. Trucks stacked high with apples drive by everyday and apparently in juicing season you can smell apples everywhere! There are permanent workers on the farms but they also take on seasonal workers in the busy months. Once the apples are picked, they are taken to the packing factories where they are essentially cosmetically analyzed - strange but true - so the higher end supermarkets demand, for instance, Pink Ladies with a high percentage of pink colouring, the lower end don't mind the greener ones, and those rejected - the uglier ones I suppose! - get sentenced to juicing and supply various drink companies. 

Thousands of crates waiting for their Pink Ladies!

I will be spending my first three months in this area working at The Village of Hope, part of the Thembalitsha foundation (http://thembavillageofhope.blogspot.com/), which works to support people in South Africa living in poverty and help them reach some sort of state of self-reliance. The Village of Hope works with children suffering with or affected by hiv and aids. There are no over-night health clinic facilities for anyone living in Grabouw and the HIV rate is about 30%, so many sick people are going untreated and unsupported, these diseases remaining rampant and destructive.  

The volunteer accommodation at the Village of Hope is right next to a live- in nine bed children's unit, which tries to combat this problem to an extent. This offers nine children diagnosed with hiv, aids or TB  full-time care. All nine children are stable but have no available care in place for them. The eventual aim is to foster them back into the community where they can be placed with new families or return to their own when they are in a position to provide care once more.

As the week has gone on I've been trying to get in the children's unit at least twice a day to have a play and get to know them - they all have very different personalities but the most satisfying thing is the change that has happened so quickly - they're no longer shy when they see me but come running and hug my legs. They now feel comfortable enough to boss me around, steal my flipflops while I'm being sat on and generally get their own way! I will soon take on the duty of the school run, taking or picking up four of them that are school age - however, this involved learning to drive the minibus, which filled me with complete terror! - its huge, quite temperamental and it takes about all my arm strength to put it into gear - so its going to take some getting used to. This said, my first journey went well and no one was injured...hurray! Driving through the townships here is like the ultimate hazard perception test, with children playing games in the road with large rocks as markers, everyone walking in the middle of the road as opposed to the pavement, as well as the chickens, cows, stray dogs and the occasional goat that quite happily congregate around the bus. 

First stop on the school run!

Another part of the Village of Hope project is a sports outreach and life-skill programme, run every afternoon with children from the local settlements. On Tuesday we headed up to 'Iraq', one of the local settlements, which was a real eye opener. Looking at it from the distance of the sports field, it looked like a waste land - dry, rocky and strewn with rubbish - and when I say 'sports field' I mean the dusty bit of ground that the children run around on in bare feet. The amazing thing about sports is that with two nets you can play pretty much anywhere. Jess and I (another volunteer) played netball, and as more girls turned up from all over the place we soon had a great game going - there was a bit of a language barrier (the community speaking mainly Causa) but once we had two teams the game pretty much ran itself - the girls straightaway lost all their inhibitions and their initial shyness was overtaken by a real competitive spirit - it was nice to think that for that couple of hours they could really lose themselves in a game.  

So all in all its been a VERY busy first week. Every day is different and there is so much to get involved with. I hope as time goes on I'm really going to settle into my role and be a strong part of the fantastic work being done here...I'm so excited to see what will come next...

...sorry for the essay, I just wanted to set the scene!