During the summer of 2007 a group of students from Netherhall House went to South Africa to improve the sanitation in a poor village near Johannesburg. Dominic Burbidge, a student at Queen Mary College describes their experiences.
South Africa is like two different worlds which often meet but rarely on good terms. One is worried, friendly, yet dangerous, and above all, struggling to get by. The other can be seen on holiday advertise¬ments in buses and trains. We went to the former and came back without a care for the latter. I was one of a group of students from Netherhall taking part in a project to provide dignified sanitation facilities for the poorest of Mmakau, a rural town in North-West Province.
Netherhall has been organising social projects to the Central-American Republic of Nicaragua since 2001. This year we changed location to South Africa, invited by Andrés Merino the former Secretary of Netherhall who now works there.
People sometimes ask me: ‘Was it hard?’. Yes, it was hard. Meeting groups of villagers who had been promised our help knowing that we could not satisfy all their pressing needs was tough. And digging through the dry mud of Africa with pickaxe and shovel was rough. But it was the sharing of smiles, jokes and songs that was really hard. Hard to leave, that is.
The project involved the construction of 25 latrines over the course of two weeks through the combined efforts of students and young professionals from different countries, as well as the locals of the village. Ten of us went from Netherhall for the project and we were joined by two more from Italy, two from Kenya and five from South Africa. The greatest mobilisation, however, was inspiring the large numbers of people in the village to help themselves.
‘People here are a bit surprised by the group,’ commented Success, a young lady of Mmakau who helped with the project. ‘It is not at all usual that you have people coming from abroad for this sort of thing.’
Graham Smith, from Leeds, was impressed by how much ‘the locals took the lead’. It was their help that changed the trip from being outside intervention to a move for local hands-on development. Many of the parishioners wanted to help their friends escape from poverty but did not have the means to provide effective long-term support. Our project gave them this possibility.
‘On the first day’, said Alvaro Tintore, the current Secretary of Netherhall and organiser of the project, ‘we met a team of about forty local people ready to help with the project. People wanted to get started straight away and they were happy to lend us any extra tools.’
Despite finding day-to-day life quite a challenge, many of the locals understood the point of their joining in this work without being paid and doing it solely to help their neighbours.
In Mmakau the company and support of the locals also ensured that our safety was not an issue.
Our normal routine involved getting up by 6:00am to arrive early for work. We finished at around 5:30pm each day, having travelled to several different sites for digging the holes and carrying out the building work.
The project also left a deep mark on us. As Justin Lau, a Hong Kong student at the LSE, put it: ‘I went out there to people’s homes to see them face-to-face and make sure we were helping. It has really helped me ward off apathy to the problems of day-to-day life elsewhere in the world.’