Step one: complete

It's the end of our first day in Red Hill. I'm tired, hot, and hungry. But what a day!

Just to catch you up on what exactly we're doing: There's a clinic in Red Hill, a shanty-town of Cape Town, that has fallen into disrepair. It's made of three shipping containers welded together, and two of the containers are no longer level. There's also a porch area that is currently uncovered. Our mission this week is to level the containers (with the help of a crane), build a roof over the porch, patch the roof of the containers, and replace some of the floor of the clinic. And we're going to do it in four days.

Today was critical in the timeline for our jobs: we needed to get posts for the roof grounded in concrete, clear away brush and debris, and get measurements for the rest of the week. And we got it all done! Tomorrow is the other really pivotal day for us: the day of the crane. It will be lifting up the containers so we can raise the footings where necessary. If we don't get the footings level tomorrow, it most likely won't happen this week. And that, obviously, would not be ideal.

I also got to spend a bit of time this afternoon at the kids club the rest of the group is running. It was so refreshing to hear forty kids singing and jumping and dancing in praise! And it gives me motivation for the rest of the week, because this clinic we're working on will be used to house kids clubs going forward.

I would be remiss to not mention that we spent yesterday going to church (where we learned about all (and I mean all) the women's groups operating in the church), seeing penguins, eating the self-proclaimed best pizza in Simon's Town, hiking to the Cape Point Lighthouse, being chased by baboons, watching ostriches, looking out over the Cape of Good Hope, and listening to Prime Circle rock Kirstenbosch. What a way to waste the day away...