Thursday 23rd November 2006
Clem Cairns - Orange Team
Murphy’s Law. Bastardin’ thing follows you everywhere, even over the equator and half way down the other side of the world. Were you ever, ever, on a building site and the fecker with the grinder was downwind? I thought not. It’s the same here. And when we sat down to damp sandwiches and no tea at eleven a truck empties a load of cinders and rubbish at the door of the house, covering all of us in dust. The sandwiches were noticeably drier afterwards. Almost used to the place now. Faces are recognized, children congregate when you produce lollipops as quick as bankers at an interest hike party. You feel part of the place in that naïve way you do after a week in Spain or the West of Somewhere, when you know the barman by name and the local slapper by sight. The street where we orange folk are building is like a busy city thoroughfare as we race to get as much finished on the penultimate day. The slagging and bickering rises with the familiarity. Dubliners slag anybody. They don’t care who or how. Countrymen do it different. Its more local. Somebody knows somebody from someone’s parish and has a bit of dirt on them, or knows someone they can threaten to send a compromising photograph to. Its relentless. Its compulsive listening. Its comedy in motion. The days pass quickly. The week has too. There are new houses with terracotta tile roofs all over the place. We are helping to change the landscape here. The mile after mile of shacks we pass to get here every morning is a reminder of the scale of that landscape.
Paula Cullen – Blue Team
Since my last contact I have continued to strive and be promoted accordingly. Yesterday morning I woke up feeling that I had been run over by a steam roller. During the night – obviously all the block moving and pushing wheelbarrows full of cement was beginning to catch up with me. Another day at “the office “ – this time to a more important post – the houses are now ready for painting and a team of us got started on one of 6 houses to be finished in 24 hours. They look great painted in different colours. The new owners are delighted to have an input so many of them helped to speed up the painting job. There was a visit arranged to see Imizamo Yethu, the township where the volunteers went to last year. I was quite disturbed to see how this township was compared to Mfuleni. Conditions are very difficult as they are living on the side of a hill. Unfortunately these townships need so much finance for education and social education. Having left our hotel at 7:30am we did not return until 9pm which was a very long day. Wednesday morning and we have our paint brushes ready to go again. The houses are taking shape and we the blue team are quite excited to learn that one of our houses is to be the “show house”. Its all hands on deck to get it finished. By close of business this evening there has been a load of top soil delivered to landscape the garden. News is out that Sean Dunne is taking the yellow team out to dinner. The green team has a canteen where they can have a cup of tea – sad to say the blue team have nothing except work and more work!!! John Moore and John Keegan have us firing on all cylinders – there is no doubt one has to be tough to be successful. Only another day and a half to get everything finished.
