Today was maintenance day for the Belmont in Africa group. We went to the Living Home Community Centre and worked for four hours helping to clean up construction debris along a fence row. That simple description fails to capture the fine efforts of the whole team today. 
Everyone worked without complaint and cooperatively until the last brick was stacked and the last fence post pulled.
We have spent a lot of time with children the last three days and they have been a simple delight. Today, we were with ourselves, the South African sun, bricks, pipes, rocks, metal beams, and wire, lots of wire. Our task was to clear debris away from a new fence row to enable the Living Hope gardener to plant shrubbery and flowers. When we arrived, Des, the maintenance supervisor for Living Hope showed us the debris and the pile of bricks and thanked us for our willingness to help in their work.
It was hard work and not nearly as rewarding at the immediate feedback that comes from working with children. There were no hugs, no laughter from smiling children, and no songs in Afrikaans. We could hear the chatter of the group stacking bricks, the swish of spade being pushed into sandy soil, the grunts of digging up stumps and poles, and the low conversation of work. Twice the students filled up the bed of a pickup truck with large stones they had unearthed. Six former fence poles with 150+ pounds of cement were pulled out of their holes. Metal beams and pipe and wiring were dug up and stacked neatly on the back of the property. The team working with bricks patiently moved 3,866 bricks from a huge tumbled pile and turned them into a neat and orderly stack.
At the end of the day, we talked about how the twenty-two of us (Dr. Overby missed all the fun by choosing the day to visiting another university partner) had worked for a total of eighty-eight hours--basically we had done the work that it would have taken one person to do in two weeks . . . in just four hours. As a non-profit organization, attempting to use every dollar (or Rand) to change lives, Living Hope exists on volunteer labor. The money we saved will go directly into making some else's life healthier and better.
Furthermore we learned, that the Living Hope building sits in such a way that one side with a porch gets wind at one time of the year and the other side with a porch gets wind the opposite time of the year. We were working on the side that gets wind this time of year. The plan is to get new shubbery in now, let it get rooted and grown, so when the wind blows on the other side of the building later in the year, the patients can move to the side of the building where we worked today. By then, what was once construction debris and unsightly piles of trash, will now be beautiful shrubs and flowers. It is not much, but when your health is poor and you are fighting for your life, a beautiful sunset, some greenery, and some flowers can do a lot to make you feel better. While we will not be there when it happens, some time next year a patient will sit on that porch and enjoy the view and feel just a little bit better. It will make every spade of dirt we shoveled, every metal pipe we moved, and every brick we stacked worthwhile. There are lots of ways and reasons to help others.