Working with Project O for the month that I was there has opened my eyes and reignited my heart's desire to do something proactive to see peoples’ lives change and have my life count for change in our world.

 

Martin Downs (founder of Project O) lives a rigorous life by his strong convictions that you live but once and that being part of the solution is the most satisfying and life-giving decision, even at the cost of the sacrifices he has to make. He and his wife, Vashti Downs and the small group of people who make the team are brimming with compassion and are tenacious, with a focus and determination that gets them up at 5am in the morning and keeps them working until long after dark. This man will stop at nothing to see change in the Valley of a Thousand Hills and his passion and relentless determination has inspired me to make radical decisions to live my life serving God to see other people’s lives changed for the better – my heart’s desire as a child, which I didn’t realise was possible to live out.

 

Project O’s visitor programme offered us tasks each morning, such as helping to redecorate the offices, making photo albums for the publicity interviews and other visitors to look at and any other practical things that were in need of doing at the project’s home. In those times we also had space to journal and keep records, email family and friends, swim in the pool and fellowship with the other team members.

In the afternoons we shared the jobs building and decorating the new self sufficient, non-carbon-footprint house, being built by Project O, in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, for five of the sponsored orphans and their grandmother to live in. The house has almost reached its completion and the project are currently hosting the BBC, who are filming a documentary on the work they are doing, in preparation for the launch of the new house (15^th Oct). The land given to Martin by the chief is the first land in the whole valley ever given by Zulu men to a white man, this is a very significant display of the trust the project have worked so hard to attain from the local people – history in the making. The house will have a wind turbine, solar panels, running water, a toilet, a bed each, internet, a cooker, a washing machine and double glazing windows – a palace in comparison to some of the shacks in the valley. They also plan to provide a vegetable garden, chickens and a boat taxi system for the nearby children to be able to cross the dam in the mornings, rather than trekking for two hours around the dam’s perimeter.

 

I spent most of my time at the house painting walls, up a ladder and having a go at digging pipe trenches with a pick-axe (much to the young local boys’ amusement, who often came by to watch and mock my poor, lady-like efforts!). I spent an afternoon using a machete to cut the waist-high grass and even had a good go at cement mixing. At times I found the slow process very frustrating, when I knew what sort of ease the work could have been done with in England, with so many trained people who are paid to do their job and with machinery and easy access, in comparison to us volunteers and the lack of facilities we had. These were the times that Martin’s sheer determination and ability to keep the team motivated struck me the most, when many people would see the task at hand as impossible, his attitude didn’t seem to entertain the idea that we could be stopped…

 

     

 

The sponsored children (over 150 on the books, still over 200 on the waiting list, who are known) have food delivered monthly to the houses where they live, often with grandmothers or aunties, but some are alone, after losing parents to the HIV/Aids virus. With the food, the project takes bible lessons, and tries to teach the children about life skills and morals. So every day the project has a routine of taking a month’s supply of beans, rice and maize to five of the kids. Sometimes delivered by car, but mostly the houses are only reachable by quad bike on the uneven terrain. I got to go with Sebello and Zamani (the project’s food deliverers) on the quad bikes, into the tiny houses and meet some of the children they were supporting, to deliver food. I was so overwhelmed by the severe lack of belongings and yet the overwhelmingly generous hearts of the people I met - old ladies offering me their only chairs, or jewellery they made their living from as gifts, children singing songs for us. The joy so many of these people had was outstanding, when I reflected on my home and how much we have, yet how unhappy so many of us are. This highlighted to me the faith that many of the people had was what gave them hope, joy and contentment.

 

Something we did in the evenings (not part of the Project O programme), when we had time, was go into the homeless shelters in Durban’s city. This, to me, was the most devastating thing I saw. I think I felt the impact of this more as most of the people in the shelters were alone, had no life structure, no job or routine and most of them had drug or alcohol habits and many of the girls were prostituting themselves as the only means they saw available to pay for their next night in the shelter. The atmosphere was dark. I could feel the devastation and loss people had experienced sitting in the room. Babies, unclothed on blankets next to their unconscious parents, little girls in beds next to dying old men and young adults just laying around with nothing to do were just some of the things that have stuck in my memory. We sat with whoever welcomed us to join them, talked to them, offered them an ear to tell about their day – many of the stories may not have been true, however for some of the people we met, having someone who cared about their struggles made a change to how they felt most other days – just another one of the people who all have their own problems. I tried my best to laugh and play with the little girls and make jokes with my peers and elders, but it was all I could do to try not to cry, because my heart was breaking.

 

The level of care for disabled people was none. Most of the disabled people were on the streets begging in the city or left alone in the shacks in the valley for fear that they may be demon possessed. It made me so grateful for the geographical blessing my family have had to be born where we are. My brother (osteogenesis imperfekta or “brittle bones”) would have had another life altogether, (if he had survived) if he’d been born somewhere else. We do not control what body, what family or what country we are born into – it struck me that some of these people were victim to their own lives out of none of their own doing and were suffering, in great numbers.

What frustrated me the most in the time I was there was the fact that the people in the valleys, living in mud huts, hundreds of children being sexually abused, whole families dying of HIV/Aids, inconceivable numbers of people going to desperate measures to find a few pence to sleep in a stone warehouse on a sheet-less mattress, slaves to drugs, alcohol and other people’s desires and the disabled, neglected and abused are statistics in the books I read at school and hear about sometimes through the media, but they are nameless, faceless. Anonymous.

 

Returning to England followed in a long digestion for me. I saw a lot of things that shocked me while I was away and really broke my heart but time to let them sink in didn’t really happen until I had time to think, pray and cry.

The time I spent there reignited the passion that has been inside me even when I was only in primary school – to love the people who are marginalised, written off, unloved and forgotten. I’m in the process of seeking my heavenly father and asking him to lead me from where I am in my training, into the next step of his plan for my life and asking him all the time to provide the desires of my heat – the opportunity to be working where I am most effective to offer a chance for hope and change to the lives of people who other people may not choose to love.

 

Thank you so much for your support, in sending me on this trip. It wasn’t just an experience for my summer, it was a time of clarification and I feel I have direction in my foresight that I wouldn’t have had, had I not gone. I am so grateful for your generosity.