Working in Africa
August 27, 2015
I have spent the last couple of weeks working with Joyce on the new website content and on various administration and organization aspects of New Sight. My regular blogging has been doing a seemingly good job on boosting the hits the current New Sight website receives. We have just got the new charity YouTube channel up and running and, with the impending arrival of a Chinese media company seeking to get some film for their documentary on New Sight, there is a lot to get in order. Yesterday I went with Henri to various locations in the Hospital compound for stock checking which sounds boring but was actually quite a laugh. It has been a good learning experience to see the kinds of difficulties that small charities face when they are still in their relative infancy, and to try and contribute where I can. Congolese customs, for example, seem to go out of their way to slow down the arrival of much needed medicine to Impfondo from the capital. As Joyce tells me, even when the money is there to buy the vital supplies, the logistics of actually getting them to a hospital in the jungle is the real difficulty. I am sure that this is a problem experienced across Africa and the rest of the world.
Last weekend, on Saturday, I had a break from working for New Sight and went to help a local repair his house using mud. We tore down an old wall, which was solidified by mud bricks as hard as cement, before placing all the broken pieces back into a new wall frame made of palm branches and bound together by vines from the jungle. We then had to dig up enough clay-like soil to fill the new wall, mix it with water until it got to a desirable consistency, and then fill the new wall with this mixture. It was one of the most physically demanding days of work I have ever done. The sun was blazing down on my skin all day, causing me to sweat faster than I could drink to replace my fluids. The next day my muscles were aching and my hands were dotted with blisters and cuts. Needless to say, a lot of gratification came from the job. Not only did I feel I had given as much help as I could to rebuild someone’s house, I also had a lot of fun doing it. There was something so beautifully simple and therapeutic about building a house. It was as if, for a moment, I had traded the rush of a modern society obsessed with future plans for an experience of subsistence living completely in the present. That is what life is like for most people living in the Likouala region who simply don’t have the time or money to afford to think about the future.
Guest Blog By
Rowan Cassels-Brown
New Sight Summer Intern
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