Township volunteers close eyes to hazards

A FIERCE wind drove coarse, dirty sand across the Freedom Park township in Cape Town throughout the weekend, caking a layer of grime over skin, clogging ears and turned the snot in your nose jet black.

It was the single biggest hazard for the 1,350 Irish volunteers on the Niall Mellon building blitz. But it is everyday life for the 50,000 people living in shacks surrounding the construction site.

By Friday, 1,500 of these people, who lined the streets to welcome the workers, will move into 200 new concrete homes — the result of the world’s largest overseas volunteering exodus since the Second World War. In the meantime the soon-to-be beneficiaries watched from outside their shacks.

These images banished any groans or moans from the labouring masses, a number of whom filed towards Dr Patricia McGettrick in the medical tent to have eye complaints seen to.

“The high winds are blowing the sand everywhere and a significant number of people have come in with eye injuries. Nothing major, but a lot of people with irritations and sensations of always having something in their eye.”

Dr McGettrick signed up as a volunteer, hoping to take up manual labour and help the brickies and chippies on site. However, as the head of the A&E ward in Dublin’s Eye and Ear Hospital, the Niall Mellon Township Trust said her skills would be better deployed as part of the 24-hour medical team.

Nobody’s skills have been wasted. Diarmuid Gavin is building a community garden and an army of block-layers are learning other trades as they and the roofers are well ahead of schedule. Yesterday a local factory opened to make emergency trusses to cope with the roofers’ speed.

Niall Mellon said the pace had surprised the organisers, especially given the volume of people and congestion on site. He hopes a good week and the publicity the blitz is attracting in South Africa will prompt planners to acting on the country’s housing problem.

He said unless the South African government adopts an approach similar to Ireland’s social housing programme it will never eradicate shack dwellings. He had publicly advertised an idea to use the World Cup as a target for providing housing for all, but he said the government was afraid to back his plans and the chance has been lost.

“I think an enormous opportunity has been lost by South Africa to provide more than two million social houses ahead of the 2010 soccer World Cup.

“I think it could have been used as a chance to upscale the need for urgency with housing,” said Mr Mellon, whose attitude is to carry on regardless and increase his own building programme to 5,000 social houses by the end of this year.