If you happened to attend Thanda’s fundraiser in New York City last night, then you were probably introduced to Twin.
Twin in his cabbage patch. (Photo by Clint Strydom: www.ClintStrydom.com)
Twin is Thanda’s construction and agriculture teacher. He is dedicated to his field — he builds huts on weekends and has started gardens for several of his family members, friends, and neighbors — and loves working with his students.
Twin fixin’ up his newest garden with some of his students.
I spoke to Twin about his work as an AIDS activist at Thanda and about his life in Umtwalume. Part of this interview was displayed at the fundraiser, but I figured, why not share more?
So, here’s Twin’s story:
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Q: Can you just tell us a little bit about what you’re doing every day?
I wake up at half-past eight. I check my mom, see if she having something for, for the breakfast. If she’s making something, well I’ll sit back and have something. Usually it’s a porridge or something. Nothing, nothing much. Then I hit a shower. By half-past nine, I slowly walk down from my house, it’s just a gravel road I walk down. I greet my eldest, eldest, eldest neighbor, my family’s neighbor, he always greet me in the morning on my walk. We have one, two chat. Then I go down, I meet my two friends. They have a small shop — they sell sweets and chips and stuff like that. I take a chips, a couple of treats, and then I walk up right to Thanda. Then I smile to my watch: I know, ten o’clock, I see smiles coming. I say, Oh, there’s the beginning of my day.
We go inside, we have the morning prayer, couple of announcements, and everyone go to use their own working spaces, and then we start working. It’s mostly like we going through the day, what we going to do, what you will be doing with your kids that day. Within that time, we find some time to contribute to each other’s work, you know, giving compliments, see if there’s something I can take from your work and stuff like that.
We meet our kids at three o’clock. That’s the beautiful part of my day, you know. It feels more like it’s a new day. When they get dismissed from school, our kids quickly rush into our classroom. We sit down, we have lunch first. Before, I used to start with lessons, but now I start with the lunch, you know, because sometimes you come to find that some of them are way too hungry, they can hardly concentrate. So, a quick lunch, and then after lunch, everyone needs to do something after lunch — standing up, walking around, but it has to be something. Simon Says, kind of games like that, you know. Brain Tease, where you have to use your brain. Then is when I teach.
A few of Twin’s students working hard (or hardly working?) in the garden.
Five o’clock, it’s a sad time because we have to close the windows of the classroom and stuff, put everything into our basket, and call it a day.
And then another day begin for me. I have to walk down the path to a soccer pitch. I have to meet with 20-25 chaps there, which are playing on my team. They all come in with a different attitude, you know, so I have to work to try and get them to understand each other first, trying to get them to be a strong team, for them to bond. I am the coach. I am the manager. I am everything.
I am the hope. I am the character of hope. Every day.
Q: How did you learn to garden?
I start recognizing myself that I might be a green-handed person, you know, when I was still in this school. I just love it. It symbolizes me, you know. It symbolizes who I am. It’s all about the earth, you know. Like permaculture. Permaculture ethics include loving and sharing, you know. So, those ethics, you know, which brought me into these things — you know, respect one another, I have to respect the soil for it to respect me — and all those, you know, I’m also having all those ethics too. I’m living with them. I’m living by them, I’ll say.
It took me some time to get kids to learn about that. I have to get them interested into this first, get them to know why is it important for them to understand this, you know, why are they doing it, what’s the benefit from them. It’s not about planting vegetables; it’s not about building houses; it’s about understanding who you are and what you’re doing and what you give and what you get. With planting, it comes with lot more principles, you know…so many, so many, including escaping poverty, leading healthy life, getting money, you know. We have a very rich land, we have a very rich soil around here. So, using this soil to the best of its advantage can help us so much in return. We put ourself into this soil, say we respect this soil. We work with this soil hand-in-hand. This soil will give us what we need. We’ll use what we need. We can just expand what we have. It can also create lot more jobs around here, you know. It just need lot more patient and I’ll say determination and stuff like that. Understand it. Feel it. Just love it.
But It doesn’t end within this school. Because I am also in their same community, you know. Some of them are my neighbors. Some of them are my friends.
Q: So tell us about helping [people] with the garden.
What we do around here, we are trying to pose the idea of people to have gardens in their home. It’s called One Home, One Garden.
Most of the time around these places we hardly have things like tomatoes, cabbages, all these necessary vegetables for special food and curries and stuff. But for us to have those things, we have to spend a couple of bucks, you know, to get to a place where we can buy them. So the reason we decided to start this program of which we giving people seedlings to start planting their own gardens, so we cut this chain of us going down to Hibberdene for some vegetables. And another thing, the very most important thing what we doing, we trying to have a sustainable way of growing food organically, which doesn’t have much of these toxic substances like that. That food comes out healthy and it helps so much for a life to survive, you know. Those are one, two, those are main missions, I would say, those are our objectives — to have people eating healthy food for them to survive for, to have a better life, I would say. More specific, those kids who have life-threatening illnesses, you know, they really need certain kind of food to eat, so if you have your garden into your house, you have easy access to that kind of food, rather than going down to the town and start buying something.
Twin is working on building a permanent gardening training site next to Thanda’s still-under-construction Computer Resource Center, pictured here.
We are successfully meeting our objectives so far ’cause lot of kids have started their own garden. We decided to engage families, too. So we started working with families, elder people. We collect elder peoples from the community, from the local community, we call a meeting. We tell them, we’ve got this to give, so who is willing to be the part of it. We let them volunteer that they want to be the part of this. So we have a list of people, round of 15 to 20 families, who wanted to join the team.
15 kids last year had their own trenches in their houses — and then there was a lot more — their own production: cabbages, spinach, those are the things which were, like, shhhew, coming out good. So this time — we are still inviting people from the community to come in — we’ll be buying seedlings, and then they will start planting their own things.
We have a very rich land, we have a very rich soil around here. People did know that there has to be a garden [at home], but they didn’t know why exactly, you know. They still crying of poverty. They’re still crying of unhealthy food and all, and so forth. But what are they doing in, in returning to change that? Nothing. So, in proposing this idea of them planting their gardens in a healthy way, it’s a first step, you know. It’s just a first step to this point where we want to getting to.
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As Twin often says, Beautiful stuff, man. Beautiful stuff.
Thanda’s construction and agriculture crew clearing the new garden site of rocks and weeds. Check out the view!
BEAUTIFUL STUFF GUYS!