SA Affordable Housing November - December 2019 // ISSUE: 79 | Page 36

PROFILE
The trials and tribulations
of employing community
workers
Peter Marshall, seemingly destined to be a farmer from England’s
Cotswolds near Epping in Essex, came to be a globe-trotting civil
engineer, and is currently resident engineer on Montrose Mega City.
Marshall spends most of his day hosting workshops for community part-
time workers to get them to see past the end of their next pay cheque.
By Eamonn Ryan
A
large part of Marshall’s job is hosting regular educational
workshops to uplift hundreds of aspiring construction
workers in Randfontein. He has an affinity for the people
of developing countries and educating them. Marshall has
worked throughout Africa and boasts the President of Eritrea
as a personal friend. From Nigeria to DR Congo and from desert
conditions to the Blyde River Canyon, his experience of diverse
working conditions has led him to describe the requirements
of a civil engineer as ‘being able to make tough decisions and
resolve problems’. That, he says, is precisely what is lacking in
the modern South African profession, where personal initiative
has been surrendered to committee decision-making.
34
NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2019
SAAffordHousing
Mentoring others, training and development is a major
ingredient of Marshall’s career, in part because he says there
is an enormous desire for education, training and upliftment
Part
of the
River
in Africa. He
gives
the Blyde
example
of Scheme
a project that
he did in Eritrea:
was one had
of the
first projects
Marshall
“The government
borrowed
the money
for a pipeline
worked on in South Africa.
project, and it was going to come in under budget. I said to
the government, we can either return the surplus money to
the lender or I could take it and build a school for all the
villages that were associated with the project. That is what
we did, and a school was built for all ages: with the
preparatory children coming in from 6:00 to 10:00, the next
saaffordablehousingmag
SA Affordable Housing
www.saaffordablehousing.co.za