News from Africa

How time has flown! Our two weeks in South Africa are now well behind us and we’ve been enjoying Zambia for a littler over a week. Next Friday, we will be returning to DC. In the meantime, we wanted to share a little news about what we’ve experienced so far. (Apologies that this is our first update – good internet connections have been a little hard to come by).

Our first week was spent with I Care, a Durban-based organization focused on helping street children. During this time, we visited a few shelters and spent an afternoon serving lunch and playing soccer at a boys’ shelter in one of the “townships” outside of Durban. We also helped out around the I Care office where needed and did a few interviews for a local paper and radio station to help promote the work of the nonprofit organizations we chose to volunteer our time with.

Our second week was spent with Habitat for Humanity as crew leaders for their annual “Youth Build” – a week long event during which six new houses were constructed. The houses we built are destined for people currently living in informal housing (i.e. shacks) in nearby townships and are part of a larger 350-home development initiated by former president Jimmy Carter. In 2000 President Carter came to this same site to inaugurate the project and participate in the building of the first home.

As crew leaders, the two of us were each responsible for a house and Anne-Claire was lucky enough to work with the future homeowner (pictured here) of the house she was working on. Her name is Muntuk; she is 33 years old, a mother of two children and a manager in a textile factory. Although as you can see in the picture she is a rather tiny woman, she did the work of two men during the time we were there – Anne-Claire could not keep up. To see more photos of some of the homes we were working on and some of the people we met, click here.

Overall we raised nearly $6,000 to donate to charity. As most of you know, we planned to split this between the two organizations we chose to work with. However, an opportunity came up that we felt we could not pass. We felt that this opportunity would be the best – most needed, most effective, and most lasting – use of the money that you all contributed. So, after careful investigation, meetings with relevant parties, etc, we decided to devote a majority of the money raised to a third organization – a tertiary vocational training school in one of the “townships” outside Durban – to create a permanent endowment to fund a scholarship program for students of nature conservation.

While we will need to wait a couple of years before the endowment reaches maturity and begins to offer meaningful awards to students, this scholarship is the first of its kind at the school, called the Mangosuthu Technikon, and will help, we hope, to attract more investments like this. Once the scholarship begins to be awarded on an annual basis, Simon and I will receive a letter from the recipient each year to learn about who they are and what they plan to do with their degree. We are very much looking forward to these letters in the future.

During the two weekends we spent in South Africa, our dear friends Holger and Andrea with whom we were staying in Durban took us to see a bit of the countryside near Durban. The first weekend was spent in the Drakensburg Mountains in a beautiful chalet in the valley below Cathedral’s Peak. In the second week, we saw zebras, giraffes, baboons, impala and other antelope, wildebeests, ostriches, monkeys, and lots and lots of warthogs at the Ithala wildlife reserve near Lesotho.

This past weekend was spent in the southern part of Zambia in Livingstone where the famous Victoria Falls are. It was an incredible sight to see. Simon is now in his second week of interviews for his dissertation research (on, for those who don’t know, genetically modified foods and Zambia’s decision not to allow GMOs in the country) and we’re enjoying getting to know a few Zambians through this research.

If we’re good, we’ll be posting another update after we return. Until then, thank you again for your generous support and encouragement. Thank you again for being there either in thought or in person on June 10. We’ll post all photos from the trip so far, including some photos from our volunteer activities, on Yahoo photos when we get back to the US.

Love,

Anne-Claire and Simon