GOOD
NEWS
9
1 November 2016
Pebbles brings hope to Hemel-en-Aarde Hedda Mittner
I
t is no mystery how the valley between Hermanus and Caledon got its name, Hemel-en-Aarde (Heaven and Earth). With its rolling hills covered in fynbos, fruit orchards and vineyards, this stretch of earth surrounded by scenic mountains paints an idyllic picture and has garnered global attention for the exceptional quality of its coolclimate wines.
Helping Hand Sponsored by Talisman Hire Volunteer Peter Hodgskin with Sophia Warner, founder-director of The Pebbles Project and Elizabeth Naudé, project manager of the Pebbles Hemel-en-Aarde Education Project in front of the building on Bergplaas that will become the new ECD Centre.
But the reality of life for the farm workers of Hemel-enAarde paints a harsher picture – one that is fraught with hardship and a lack of opportunities, especially for the children of this farming community. “Seeing young children along the road walking many kilometres to school in all weather, sometimes without proper shoes or warm clothes just broke my heart,” says Carolyn Martin of Creation Wines. As a wine estate in the upper reaches of the valley, known as Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge, Carolyn feels a keen responsibility towards the community of farm workers in this remote area. While most of the younger children attend Diepgat Primary School and the older children go to Overberg High School in Caledon, the distances to and from school are a challenge. “I found out that over 30 children in the area are not going to school at all because of a lack of transport,” says Carolyn. “There is also a huge need for nursery school and day-care facilities for children who are left at home all day while their parents work on the farms.” Determined to rise to the challenge, Carolyn’s “pie in the sky” vision of establishing adequate facilities and services for the children finally became a reality when two key figures came on board. The first one is Sophia Warner, a special needs teacher from the UK and founder-director of The Pebbles Project, and the second is wellknown local environmentalist and philanthropist, Antony van Hoogstraten. One of Antony’s properties is a large farm in Hemel-en-Aarde Ridge called Bergplaas, which is located adjacent to Diepgat, and when Carolyn learnt there were several unutilised buildings on the farm that Antony would be willing to rent out, she immediately contacted Sophia.
Says Carolyn: “I knew of the wonderful work Sophia had been doing among the farming communities in the Cape Winelands and she was the ideal person to head up this project.”
and the centre will function as a feeder school for Diepgat Primary which accommodates children from Grade R to Grade 7. Their next priority is after-care facilities for children from Grade R to matric, which will also offer a safe environment for local high school learners who attend Overberg High.
The Pebbles Project is an educational trust and nonprofit organisation, founded in 2004 by Sophia, shortly after making South Africa her new home. “My sister had been living in the winelands since 1998 and I often visited her from London,” says Sophia. “It became harder to go home after every visit, until I decided to move here permanently in 2003.”
“Once the ECD and ASC are up and running, we’d also like to provide special needs education and introduce a clinic at Bergplaas to provide healthcare for the children and their families without the need to take a whole day off work to visit a clinic or hospital in Hermanus,” says Sophia.
With her sister working in the wine industry, Sophia experienced first-hand the devastating effects of alcohol foetal syndrome (FAS) on the children in the area, especially those of farmworkers. “I desperately wanted to help these children,” she says, “until I realised that they were not the only ones who needed support. There was a huge lack of healthcare, early childhood education (ECD) and after-care facilities for the children growing up on the wine farms, and I realised the importance of supporting a whole community rather than individual children in isolation.” Working with farm owners and their workers to find solutions, Sophia launched the Pebbles Project on the Villiera wine estate near
Stellenbosch, where farm buildings were made available for a fully equipped ECD centre and an afterschool club (ASC) where older children could spend their afternoons in a safe environment and complete their homework assignments under supervision while their parents are still at work. Since then, 43 different facilities have been established on several farms in the winelands, stretching from Somerset West to Wellington, as well as Citrusdal and now Hemel-enAarde.
“I’m more South African now than English,” says Sophia, who has also adopted two children, now aged 7 and 12, since moving to the Cape. On the Pebbles Hemel-en-Aarde Education Project, she will be working closely with project manager Elizabeth Naude, who recently relocated from the winelands to Hermanus with her husband and threeyear-old son. Together, these two women epitomise the Pebbles Project’s motto Changing Lives. Their main emphasis will be ECD education for children from birth to 5 years,
“But at the moment, one of the most crucial aspects of this project is transport. We are currently fund-raising for a 22-seater minibus to transport children to school in the mornings, to after-care after school and finally to their homes in the late afternoon. The cost of the bus is over R600 000 and we are about two thirds of the way there, having raised R213 000.” Creation Wines recently hosted a Charity Sunset Serenade, co-sponsored by De Hoop Collection Nature Reserve, to help raise funds for the minibus, visitors to the Creation tasting room are also invited to make a donation, joining a growing group of supporters that include the Cape Wine Auction, Standard Bank, the
Beare Foundation and Ford Hermanus. None of these generous donors is working harder than Peter Hodgskin, widely known as Dizzy Pete, who lives on Bergplaas where he has been clearing the land of aliens for the past 7 years. Dizzy Pete has volunteered his labour and skills to oversee the renovation of the buildings on the farm and the establishment of an outside play area and sustainable vegetable garden. “It is so exciting to see the progress being made at Bergplaas,” says Sophia. “We can not thank Antony and Dizzy Pete enough. There are still many items that we need, but we are confident that we’ll be able to open the ECD Centre in January next year.” Local individuals, organisations and businesses can also support the Pebbles Hemel-enAarde Education Project by donating any of the following much-needed items: sand, cement, paint, tiles, windows and doors, security gates, outside shading, fencing, sanitary ware, outside furniture, a weed eater, double kitchen sink, fridge, washing machine, stove, crockery and cutlery, pots and pans, baby cots, work tables and chairs, stationery, books and educational toys. Contact Pebbles Hemel-enAarde project manager Elizabeth Naude on 071 160 2454 / 072 284 0378 or elizabeth@pebblesproject.co.za For more information, go to www.pebblesproject.co.za