The largest ever Niall Mellon Township Trust (NMTT) Building Blitz is due to take place on November 2, with the announcement that 1,350 men and women will be setting off to South Africa.

In its fifth year, the annual Building Blitz will see Irish volunteers building a planned 200 houses in Freedom Park, a township in Cape Town.

This Building Blitz is part of an annual one-week volunteer trip organised by NMTT and has been building steadily since its inception in 2002, when 150 volunteers built 25 houses in the Imizamo Yethu township. In the past five years, the Trust has built over 1,500 houses in four townships in South Africa, 251 of these by volunteers on previous Blitzes, with volunteer numbers for the annual Building Blitz growing extensively year-by-year.

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The houses built provide homes for thousands of impoverished families, moving them from one roomed shacks to three and two bed roomed houses with a kitchen and bathroom, running water, electricity and sanitation.

The men and women from across Ireland will fly to Cape Town on four airbusses departing from Dublin and Shannon for a week long intensive building campaign. Each day 22 coaches will depart Cape Town with the team of volunteers, and travel 40km to Freedom Park, a township created during the Apartheid with a population of over 490 families.

Here the volunteers will be divided up into 15 teams and complete the building of 200 homes, one community centre and a "Garden of Hope". If the aim is met, some 200 families, made up of more than 1,200 people will finally have a proper place to call home and a safe and warm environment to raise their families.

In the countdown to the departure date, a final fund-raising push is underway for the 1,350 men and women from across Ireland, each of whom has to raise a minimum of €4,000 in order to make the trip to build homes in some of the poorest shanty towns in South Africa.

Philanthropist and property developer Niall Mellon in 2002 set up the trust, which aims to help house the deeply impoverished in South Africa. Though the South African government has been actively involved in building some 2.1 million homes since the fall of apartheid in 1994, 2.4 million families are still in desperate need of housing.

(JM)