For Joyce, EduPlant has opened many doors, not only for her school and for villages in the Bushbuckridge area, but has also been instrumental in her own development.  Quietly spoken Joyce started her teaching career some 20 years ago with a Certificate in Primary Teaching: she is now on the verge of completing a BEd degree. Joyce dreamed of teaching at a school that was not dilapidated, that had access to water and was situated in beautiful surrounds. The first step, she knew, was to plant trees to form a windbreak. A Canadian family was the first benefactor. They had just lost their daughter and in memory of their child, they donated R500 to the school for tree planting.

Every year since, Joyce has planted a tree on the school grounds ‘for Lisa Anne’. The turning point for Joyce, though, was attending a permaculture course through FTFA. “It changed my life,” she says. “We planted a vegetable garden at the school and used whatever natural resources we could lay our hands on, like kraal manure, there being no money for fertiliser. It just took off – from the money made from selling the vegetables we’ve bought paint and the school is beginning to look as I saw it in my dreams!” In true ‘ubuntu’ fashion, however, some of the produce is given to the community of Mozambiquan refugees and to the elderly.

This is only part of what Joyce has implemented. She has set up what she calls the Mavilosi Permaculture project where those who cannot afford to pay the school fees work in the gardens. She is busy with her ‘Thabang project’ which entails teaching permaculture principles to 64 women in a nearby village. Recognition of Joyce’s hard work and determination has led to a number of awards, apart from EduPlant.  The most recent was being selected the winner of the Nestlé 2004 Community Nutrition Award competition.

Joyce’s story is but one example. Two of the other EduPlant winners were schools for learners with special needs, the Eastern Cape based Sive School for the Deaf and the Harding Special School in Kwazulu Natal. Comments educator Joy Nightingale from the latter school, “the lives of some our most difficult children have been changed through EduPlant. Gardening is an activity that no matter what a child’s disability, he or she can do it. It teaches them to think laterally.”

Yet another inspirational story is that of Tudi Galloway. Working from the Mtuba Christian Academy in Mtubatuba, Tudi is single-handedly working with no less than 187 schools in the area. Tudi comments, as do so many other educators, that “it is really awesome to see what some people are doing, in spite of the challenges that they face.” She remains inspired by how rural communities manage to achieve such tangible results with permaculture gardens, in spite of a lack of water and insufficient funding for other essentials, such as fencing to protect gardens from animals which destroy or damage crops.