South Africa: The Carpenter

In this episode of Africa Within, we meet Alexander Grobler, a Cape Town carpenter’s son whose hands were made for building — but who instead found work in conflict, traveling across Africa to engage in lucrative, soul-draining military activity. By 2010, severe PTSD had left him hollow, and years of therapy kept him alive, but not whole. His salvation came not from a doctor, but from the Russian Orthodox Church — and not from its sermons, but from the solitary labor of building it with his own hands. Today, Alexander knows every flaw in those walls. For him, the church is penance, therapy, and legacy: proof that when all else fades, he built something that will remain.