I am pretty sure today is Wednesday June 24th at 3:42pm which means if you are in Seattle it is Wed. June 24th at 6:42 in the morning (7:42 in CO). The days are flying by and I'm mixing them all together!
Yesterday we ended our time in Cape Town (will return a day before our flight home in a few weeks). Re-packed all of our belongings and spent the morning downtown at the District 6 museum which is a fascinating place, our tour guide was full of information and recalled where he lived in District 6 before he was forced to relocate and see his home bulldozed. You can find out more about what happened here.
Van packed to the brim, our sweet driver Desmond back to transport us we headed to Stellenbosch. The town itself is so quaint and adorable! It reminded me of the U-District, or Fort Collins, I suppose a college town is the same no matter where in the world you are! We moved our belongings into the dorm Nerina where we will stay for the next 8 days. They look much like our dorms except that there's no heating and it's a quite cold. Thanks to Nick for letting me borrow is SUPER warm sleeping bag!!
We assembled with other students (mostly South Africans) who are here for the International Student Build (ISB) 2009. They split us up into different "house" groups as we will be building 6 different houses in the Mfuleni township about 20 minutes away. My house group is number 2 - our leader, Klaus, is a 3rd year here at the University of Stellenbosch (they are on winter break currently) and lives in Stellenbosch. There's a girl from Switzerland in our group, Bri and I are representing our American Washington group and the rest around from South Africa. There have been so many great conversations asking each other what life is like in each place. Turns out, 20 year old around the world do basically the same things! My favorite question:
"Is spring break really like they show it in the movies?"
Um, I hope not. And on that note - don't believe everything you see in Hangover either! (Though Vegas is a rather wild and crazy anomaly).
Anyways, there were activities last night as we got to know each other. This morning at an all too early 6:45 wake up call we gathered and headed to the township. It's so exciting to see the tin shacks slowly being replaced by strong brick homes, Habitat does such an amazing thing, truly changing people's lives. Our site right now is a slab of concrete I believe 40 km square. (I think that's what they said...it's not very big and I'm not very good at conversions so don't ask me what that is in feet...) We spent some of the time clearing water from the foundation and moving building materials. We then started a brick passing line to get bricks piled and ready for assembling walls. I feel tougher already...hopefully I'll come back with some muscle!!
Unfortunately, it's been raining a lot and we weren't able to continue building because the cement wouldn't settle right and it would be tragic to have to tear a house down because it wasn't stable. So, we must wait for better weather when we can do the job right -- please pray for sunshine!!!
Friends are abundant and the Habitat leaders have plenty of activities for us (we learned how to drum last night) and a quiz night this evening. Stellenbosch is treating us well (I just wish it was a teency bit warmer...)
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