The house the Mercy girls built

CLAPS and cheers heralded their arrival and while it wasn’t all a song and dance, students plumbed, painted and plastered as they saw a shell transform into a first-ever home for three generations of a family that had lived in a dark shack.

On a Cape Town site where snakes slither in the grass, the school crest from Cork’s Mount Mercy College now graces one of the houses completed by the volunteers with the Niall Mellon Township Trust.

Students Niamh O’Shea, Aoife Brady, Eimear O’Callaghan and Grace Kelleher recall, in diary format, a recent week spent with their teacher Alex Savage in the township of Witsand.