1 Slum, 7 Days, 200 New Homes

For the first time, Mona Miller has a real roof, solid walls and glass windows. Lights come on at the flick of a switch, water flows from the tap and she has the dignity of a toilet. Miller will move into her first proper home this weekend thanks to a building blitz by nearly 1,400 Irish volunteers, who completed a mission Friday to construct 200 houses in a week in the depressing, dusty -- and hopelessly misnamed -- Freedom Park slum. In the biggest project by foreign volunteers in South Africa, the Irish bricklayers, plasterers, painters and general helpers worked to make a dent in the country's chronic housing crisis. The initiative, now in its fifth year, was organized by Niall Mellon, a millionaire Irish entrepreneur who bought a holiday home near Cape Town but could not accept the squalor in the townships around the jewel in South Africa’s tourist crown.

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