June 6, 2003
By Lucille Davie
A YEAR ago David Masilo was an unemployed 64-year-old digging trenches, not quite sure why he was spending so much energy on something that seemed pointless. Now, he is a proud gardener with rows of Chinese cabbages, spinach, carrots and turnips growing from those trenches.
Masilo's garden is part of Region 4's poverty alleviation initiative. These days he spends his day tending his garden (about a tenth of an acre), in Claremont, 12 kilometres west of the city centre.
Masilo, who was previously employed as a dry cleaning operator, and then legally selling beer from a rented house, initially found the work tough.
"It was hard work, I had a big stomach when I started, which has now gone. Now I am fit and fresh. It's alright now."
The project started last May with 30 people, but only Masilo saw it through - the others wanted immediate salaries but hard cash was almost nine months away. It's only been since February this year that he has started to earn R500 a month.
Masilo lives with his unemployed wife in a shack in Joe Slovo squatter camp in Lenasia, some 35 kilometres from his garden.
Fellow gardener Willie Phadsiri helps Masilo, and the two of them are clearing and digging trenches in what were previously open, grassy fields at the Danie van Zyl Recreation Centre, Claremont, in Region 4. They now have a space the size of a soccer field fenced off with palisade fencing (paid for by Region 4), and they're systematically working their way into the field, creating rows of beds measuring one by eight metres.
Phadsiri's core job is working for the Region's
Housing Department as a supervisor at various blocks of flats in
neighbouring Newclare. He also owns a large garden - 45 metres by 75 metres - in Soweto, where he started a small garden alongside his cousin's mielie patch. Commuters from the nearby railway station stopped to buy his vegetables, so he expanded his operation and now earns around R750 a month from his garden.
Phadsiri was spotted by Region 4's Regional Director Lawrence Boya on one of his roadshows, and brought in to train and assist Masilo. They make a good team.
They use organic methods: the trench goes down half a metre and is filled with rusty tins, clumps of dead grass, paper and anything that rots, and then covered. This, the men say, will last as compost for five years. Soft cut grass is placed around the vegetables, to halt evaporation and keep the roots moist. If an insecticide is needed, a mixture of cooked tobacco, sunlight soap and chillies is placed with water in a five litre container for 24 hours, then sprayed on the plants.
But the plants don't look as if they need this - they're bustling with good, green health.
It's takes the two of them about six hours to dig the trench with a pick and a spade, line it with "compost", and cover it, creating a raised bed with a trough for water collection around it, then planting seeds.
For the moment the vegetables are watered by means of a hose, but a sprinkler system is in the process of being installed, funded by Region 4. At first they purchased seed in small, regular packets. But as more beds have been created, large kilogram bags of seed are now bought.
Local Claremont residents and Region 4 staff members buy the vegetables, placing orders and getting Nomvula Mjuza, Project Manager for poverty alleviation projects, to collect their vegetables.
Mjuza says they're working on two models of job creation: people are given individual plots of land to cultivate, and they are free to employ others to help them tend the garden; alternatively, one big group tends a large garden. She says the first model works better because it is more personalised and entrepreneurial.
Region 4 is planning to establish gardens in various clinics in its broader precinct.
The region has another poverty alleviation project up and running - training women in basket-making techniques. The women are now producing beautiful, colourful baskets. One woman has even bought a house with the proceeds of her efforts.
Phadsiri agrees that it's hard work building a vegetable bed from scratch. He says: "You get nothing without pain."
Masilo and Phadsiri hold up a sample of their vegetables: large, bright orange carrots, huge forest-green Chinese cabbage leaves and full, round beetroot. Hard work, but worth the effort.
