Category: Habitat for Humanity
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the build
I thought I should take a moment to duck out of the sweltering Burkina sun to let you know how things are going. Where to start? How about the build… Akwabaa (“welcome” in the local Ghanaian dialect) Humjibre is a small remote village of 3000 people located about an 9 hour drive from Accra. Upon…
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1 week to go
Vaccinations against every bug real or imagined roaming the earth: $250. Visas to enter 3 countries no one has ever heard of: $300. Plane ticket to the other side of the world for a wikkidly fun trip: $1,400. That knot in your stomach in the days leading up to your departure for fear of forgetting…
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A la prochaine
Living in a village with no lights in a part of the world where the sun sets at 6:00 pm has a great effect on the body. Dinner is eaten by candlelight and any reading or journal writing is done with the help of a flashlight or headlamp. More importantly, it means that you are…
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First Day of Work
A word about our lodgings. We are staying in 2 Habitat houses about 36 square metres in size each. In that space, there are 2 bedrooms, a living/dining room, a kitchen, pantry closet and a space that could be used for storage or as a shower stall (latrine is behind the house). Normally, rural African…
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Hello from Tiyende Pamodzi, Zambia
Well I’ve been here for a couple of full days now and have been able to get a good sense of the village where we’re living and working. I met up with my Habitat group at Heathrow airport on Wednesday evening. We were supposed to fly out at 7:15 in the evening local time, but…
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Fin
I have been back home now since last Tuesday night trying to revert back to my old life. It hasn’t been an easy transition, which is not surprising, and it has kept me from writing the final journal entry. Nonetheless, I thought I better get on this before the immediacy and clarity of my thoughts…
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Farewell Lesotho. And now back to South Africa.
I’ve been a little negligent on sending updates, mostly because I have been on the move a lot lately since I left Maseru. Today is my last full day in Jo’burg before returning home. The past week has flown by so quickly yet it seems I am a world away from Lesotho where I spent…
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A weekend break and a night on the town
A friend of mine told me before leaving on this trip of an article he had read predicting that Lesotho could be the first country to “disappear” because of disease, particularly AIDS. Lesotho’s prolonged drought and, as the world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs would point out, its economic isolation as a landlocked country with limited…
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The build
We have been working at the build site since Thursday, but our first full day on the job was yesterday. The work is pretty strenuous all in all…digging foundations, brick-making or levelling the interior floor space once the outside structure is up (to prepare for concrete pouring). I have been spending most of my time…
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Hello from Cape Town
I arrived here Saturday night after a long wait at immigration. The flight went well even though it was excruciatingly long. I managed to break it up by using my layover in Amsterdam to take off into the city for a one-hour look-see. Not much to see in Amsterdam at 7:30 am, but hey, at…
sedativegunk 