Like most successful padstalle, Oudebosch Farm Stall has the usual range of delicious pies, home-made jams, rusks and biscuits.
But poke about a little more and you’ll find embroidered images all over the place.
Bright quilts, ponchos, placemats, aprons, all adorned with coloured birds, rhinos, mice, lions, people, flowers, cows, chickens, sheep and country scenes.
While we were there, owner Dewald Niemann told us a little about this local project, which is uplifting dozens of women in the area.
“But come, let me rather introduce you to some of the people who are making it happen.”
Magel Naude and Leonie de Lange of Eersterivier Project Organisation (EPO) are found there at least once a week, sipping Dewald’s excellent coffee.
What they told us made us marvel once again at the unheralded, unsung work that farmers’ wives all around the country are doing to uplift small communities around them.
This particular story started one day in 1998, at a weekly prayer meeting between farmers’ wives.
Hettie de Klerk from nearby Heidestrand had suddenly voiced an idea. What about organising meetings with the women that lived and worked on the farms, she suggested.
“We live with them, but we know so little about them.”
A few weeks later this new club held its first meeting. Around tea and biscuits, the women found that despite vast differences in lifestyle, income and backgrounds, there was much in common.
“We discussed child rearing and swopped tips on growing vegetables,” recalls Magel Naude.
But the farmers’ wives also saw there was a desperate need for more income for female farm employees.The idea to empower through embroidery was to become their flagship project.
It started simply in 2003, with Leonie – who’d taught needlework in Clocolan for 17 years – teaching a few of the women to make embroidered pot holders from home.
Ansie Loots, Magel and a few others managed to rustle up the first order – for 200 pot holders. They sold out in a matter of weeks and the Eersterivier Embroidery Project was born.
Now there are about 70 women in the Koukamma area making brightly embroidered cloth squares that appear on placemats, pot-holders, tablecloths, aprons, oven gloves, shopping bags, quilts, bibs and ponchos.
The embroiderers pick their own colours to illustrate the images.
“It’s uncanny what you can tell from a woman’s state of mind by her stitches and the colours she chooses,” says Leonie. “An angry woman will make big, uneven stitches. A sad woman will pick dull colours.”
As soon as Leonie sees the warning signs, she contacts the leader of the group, who gently approaches her group member to find out what’s wrong. If it’s anything serious, a local life skills expert, llanie Rademeyer, is called in to help.
So far there are eight groups, some on farms, some in areas like Woodlands and Kareedouw, some in tiny settlements like Eersterivier Kruis – a place so small it doesn’t appear on any but the most detailed map.
The women embroider from home, in their own time. For most it’s a welcome addition to the family income. They use it for their children’s education, clothes, appliances, insurance, tithing, waterbills, or saving. For others, it’s their only income. For all it’s a source of dignity, pride and daily beauty.
Each woman is paid per embroidered square produced, and their names are part of the work. At Eersterivier Kruis we came across Amy Minnaar’s group, needles flashing in the sun while they chatted among themselves.
“Young Bastenay Goeda has been working with the embroidery project for two years now, and it’s been a godsend for her. She has no husband and this makes up her entire income. Monica Nicolac, a very devout woman, uses the money as her household’s contribution to the church.
Cheryll Heuning, who has been with the project for five years now, mostly spends the money on her toddler Amy, who was elected the leader by the women she works with, has been part of the project for nearly seven years. She uses the money earned to pay her water bill and insurance. When we met her she was working extra hard, saving up to buy a generator. But producing the embroidery is only the first part of the story.
Near the Tsitsikamma area is the little Moravian Mission village of Clarkson, now 170 years old. Here we find the Clarkson Sewing Project, under the leadership of Victoria Lawack, a woman with twinkling eyes and a thread of pure steel running through her.
Victoria’s group numbers about a dozen or so women, most of whom have been sewing since the Eastern Cape’s Department of Social Development delivered the machines in 2000.
It irks Victoria terribly that schools so seldom teach needlework these days – she was a sewing teacher years ago. “The girls of today are going to grow up unable to even fix their husband’s trousers,” she exclaims.
But it does make Victoria proud to see how the project has empowered the women there to support themselves. All the extra work they’ve been getting for the past few years from the Eersterivier Project Organisation has made a real difference.
It’s steady work and supplements the other work the sewing group does – the tracksuits, school uniforms and bags.
Her group of seamstresses take each embroidered square and put it on a backing of traditional shweshwe material.
Then the product is fashioned into bags, pot-holders, tablecloths, ponchos and placemats, ready for sale under the label ‘Tsitsikamma Eersterivier Embroidery’.
In a quiet dairy farming area near the Tsitsikamma, women’s lives are being uplifted by a remarkable embroidery project.
But Clarkson holds many attractions, and one resident, William Uithaler, is waiting outside, keen to show us his beloved town.
Over the years William has become more and more fascinated by Clarkson’s history and he has dived deep into the writings of the old leraars (pastors).
“Those German people wrote very deep things,” he says wonderingly.
He walks around with a file full of notes he’s made on Clarkson, ruefully admitting that few of the local youth show any interest.
We enter the church, Like all Moravian churches, it is white all over – white pews, white walls, white curtains, and not a cross to be seen.The seamstresses enter and sing lilting Moravian gospel songs in pure voices.
In the old days when he was young, William tells us, all the men had to wear jackets and ties all Sunday, whether at church or not. And the women, of course, had to wear formal dresses. Now things are far more casual.
Many Moravian missions boast a basuinorkes (a brass band), and Clarkson’s group, led by Clint Lawack on cornet, is in high demand. That weekend they were playing at nearby Thornham, and also at the KhoiSan Village near Tsitsikamma.
We wander around the tall trees and old gravestones and William gazes happily over the little town.”I was born and raised here. And when I finally go to the long trees, this is where I hope to be buried.”
The last word, though, goes to Tannie Anna Minnaar, aged well past 80, one of the beloved elders of Eersterivier Kruis. We find her completely absorbed in one of the daily Afrikaans radio dramas. She talks about the characters as if they were real acquaintances, shaking her head at the stupidity of one, a young girl who has fallen pregnant.
As we leave, she leans over her skinderdeur (stable-door) and gives us two pieces of good advice. “Now, as you drive, don’t pick up strangers on the road.”
“We won’t, Tannie,” we assure her
“And another thing, you must close your doors. Lock them.”
We grin and thank her, and refrain from asking why hers had been standing wide open. What a delightful old lady.
Starting at Schools
The Eersterivier Project Organisation (EPO) has now branched out to focus on children.They have set up two nursery schools with trained teachers, and at Eersterivier Kruis’s Gustav Reichel Primary School, Nellie Cola takes the Grade R class. Already the school teachers have noticed a positive difference in the school readiness of the children coming into Grade I.
Ruben Kleinbooi.the principal of the school, has become something of a champion of the EPO, and the school has received a number of awards for its vegetable gardens. In fact, in 2006, this was designated one of South Africa’s Eco-Schools.
The EPO has also helped set up a library and computer centre with media studies classes at the school.
How to get there
- Map reference F5
Eersterivier Project Organisation
- Johan Strydom 072 724 9600, epo@live.co.za
- Oudebosch Farm Stall 042 285 0562,
- oudeboschfarmstall@mtnloaded.co.za.
- You’ll find it on the corner of the RI02 and R402
This article is taken from the Country Life December 2010 issue. Text by Julienne Du Toit, Pictures by Chris Marais www.karoospace.co.za
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