A Reflection on SA’09 by David Hughes, Belvedere College
The first two days of the "South Africa Challenge 2009" contained an awful lot of travelling and upon reaching Johannesburg Airport I realised that my phone, a gadget that was I was very rarely separated from, was missing! Phoneless, sleep-deprived and in an enormous airport, I honestly questioned myself whether or not I was cut out for this experience, whether or not I was a strong enough person. However after a good night's sleep and a big breakfast on our first morning in Resthaven Guesthouse at Matatiele in South Africa’s Eastern Cape I began to feel a lot more at ease. And as soon as we got into the van and onto the "dirt road" which cut through neighbourhoods of small, almost bleak living conditions, I knew this experience was for me. The hardship of living in these bleak - for want of a better word - conditions however was far from the faces of the local people who enthusiastically waved every time we saw them. The smiles of the local children were enough to warm you up on even the coldest of South African mornings - and we had some very, very cold mornings as it was winter there!
Having recovered from the few early worries, and now feeling a burning desire to get into the "nitty-gritty" work on the building site, we met our co-workers on our site. This I believe was the highlight of the two weeks for me - the interaction and banter we had with our co-workers and with the local children on the site. The warmth and friendship that built up between the two groups of very different people from different backgrounds was something that amazed me. I was an awful, awful brick layer yet I was trusted by the second day to brick-lay on one of the outside walls. And by Wednesday, I was helping to build the inside wall. This trust, coupled with the incredible patience of the professional builders on the site - even when the inside wall I had helped with had to be knocked down - was really comforting. It meant we were not scared to make a mistake and it also provided a lovely atmosphere around the site. Even accidentally knocking over a wheel-barrow of "mortar" was met with smiles and laughter rather than a frustrated anger - which would be expected in Ireland.
One of the most common and endearing things we would see and hear every day on the site was smiles and laughter. While they seem like very small, simple things, when we saw some of the workers walking back to their homes during the lunch break, to their small homes and even smaller meals, or even hearing stories of their lives and lives of people in their villages, it makes the smiles and laughter even more precious. It put a lot of things in perspective for me. Would Irish people be smiling and laughing if they lived like the people who lived around Ntabeni JS school lived? It made our problems seem miniscule. During the two weeks the word "perspective" came up again and again when chatting with the lads and in the reflections also. It is something that really hit me. Life in Ireland and in Ntabeni, Matatiele and around the Eastern Cape was just so different to life in Ireland and it has really made me think about how I live my life in Ireland. One thing that has stuck with me was and is our wastefulness. I mentioned this during our reflection evenings, and I've given it some more thought since I've come home. Every day we knew we would get three solid meals during the day and this assurance meant we never would go hungry. During lunch lots of our group, of which I was one of the worst if not the worst offender, would discard parts of our lunch simply due to there being too much butter, or cheese or something that didn’t take our fancy on that day in our lunch. So we usually would offer what we didn't want to the rest of the workers or the children on the site, and they would be delighted to have whatever food we were "discarding" and wouldn’t mind what it was due to one simple fact - it was food! I kept questioning myself, rightly and wrongly, due to this, what kind of human being I was and what this wastefulness made me. I still haven’t really found my answer to that question yet to be honest.
I really enjoyed the talks we had at night with guest speakers during the second week. The HIV/AIDS talk was something I found very interesting and touching as well, just hearing about the realities of life living with the disease was such an eye opener and illustrated the strength and bravery of the sufferers while also highlighting the problems that existed in the country. The things Philip( who was our “fear an ti” at our accommodation) would tell us about being a white person in South Africa was fascinating as well.
The SA experience made me think about what made me happy at home. Talking with everyone since we've come home there is acceptance from everyone that our time in South Africa was the happiest in our lives and while it may sound very easy and shallow to say that, I honestly believe it to be true. Seeing photographs from the trip is a really nice reminder of our time over there. There was a really great bond between everyone on the trip, and it was a really happy time.
