as part of one of our dutch (HAN) university students thesis he needed to find out what difference the sports outreach that we run in the community had made to the young people that we work with, so this morning we (me and bart) spent an hour interviewing a couple of the boys that we work with in the iraq squatter camp.
the area is made up of small tin shacks with limited access to running water, no basic sanitation and no electricity, the local municipality has been encouraging people to move their homes to a new area, slightly nearer to town (like 200 yards!) but on what will become 'serviced' plots...that basically means that they will have a stand pipe within walking distance, access to a toilet, which they will share with another 12 families, but still no electricity.
people have slowly been moving their homes to this new area, and whilst chatting with the boys this morning i found out that the local community have named the place zwelitsha (or new rest)....whilst the name is somewhat better than iraq i still wonder how anyone can call that place 'rest', but for those few families that's what it is and we are constantly challenged by the resilience of these people who live in the most desperate conditions in the world.
the photo shows a small boy who was desperate for me to take a photo of him reading his bible in his new home at new rest!
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