Our Soweto farmer
Meet our farmer

Our farmer's name was Ms Mathabo from Tladi, Soweto. Her farm was situated in the backyard of the local municipal offices in Soweto. Ms Mathabo was very welcoming from the very first day we met her. She is 40 years old and has 2 kids, an 18 year old girl and a 8 year old boy. Our first meeting with our farmer was in March, I remember she called us that morning to confirm if we were coming. She continued calling us up until we arrived at the farm. The first thing she said was, 'I am glad you did not get lost because this place is far from where you girls are coming from.' From that very moment, I knew we met a very caring individual and I was looking forward to working with her. 

  

That day she introduced us to her colleagues, they we were welcoming too. We kept in touch and Ms Mathabo suggested we keep in touch via What App because after we introduced our selves she must have picked up that some of my group members stay far from Soweto. Hence she suggested we talk via What App to make things easy as it was also a lot of money to travel to from Auckland Park to Soweto now and again.

What we did for our farmer

Above is one of our Whatsapp group chat with  our farmer.

A date for our second meeting was set and this was during our June holidays. Our schedule on this day was to help the ladies with ploughing. What a day it was! On the day Ms Mathabo together with her collegues organised ploughing material for us. When we got there, we did not waste time we went straight to work. As we took breaks, Ms Mathabo organised cold water foe us and we sat under a tree and we talked about each others backgrounds. We heard some inspiring stories from the old ladies behind their passion for farming. I remember very well one of the ladies telling us that her dream to work with young people so that she can pass her knowledge and skills on farming because she is old now and there isn't much she can do.

As we were working on the farm, we also noticed that there were people from the community who were coming to purchase the vegetables in the farm. This is when we suggested the idea to design a business card for our farmer. The idea behind this was so that Ms Mathabo can be contacted and customers could place orders so that they can be assisted faster when they get to the farm. We only designed one business card because Ms Mathabo is the only one with a cellphone.

She together with the ladies loved the idea! Lerato, one of my group members designed the business card and we took to the the farmers. They were really impressed and Ms Mathabo had no problem with printing it out her self.

Our Whats app conversation with the Youth leader

As we were going on with our project, we also had the opportunity to meet some of the young people from the community who were not staying far from the municipality offices were the farm was. We met a group of guys from the local church called Universal. The aim was to find people that will assist the ladies with the farm when were no longer available. Although there were some issues from the church because we had to first get the 'go ahead' from the senior Pastor of the church, we finally managed to get the go ahead and we met with the youth leader who then assisted us in organizing a group of guys to help with the farm. Indeed they went to the farm and assisted Ms Mathabo and the other ladies.

Be good, do good...

Above is the picture of myself packing the spinach that was ready to be sold

In conclusion, I really had fun working with the ladies. The experience was indeed overwhelming because we met and worked with people who were willing to assist us with everything we needed. Working with the elders is an experience in its self. Our farmer is passionate about education and she said this is also the reasons why she agreed to help the PR department by allowing students (us) come work with her.

Although we came from different backgrounds, especially with the youth of Universal church. The youth from the church were willing to go all out to assist us. This made me realize that every individual is important, whether you know we know each other or not. I hope that the relationship we created between Ms Mathabo and the youth of Universal is still on going.

My group members and in the background its me and Ms Mathabo.