Cape Town: Planting Days & Wrapping Up

As it is my final week in Cape Town, my time with Heart Capital is coming to a close this Friday...but first an update of the last few weeks.

Cape Town at Night From Lion's Head Full Moon Hike

We finally had the planting day for one of the Techno Park companies as well as some other planting purchases that were made. This was combined with a day where about 20-30 University of Stellenbosch students came to help build, plant, and dig at our Kayamandi site.

Volunteers, Interns, and the Sandbag Boys in Kayamandi

Techno Park Company, CompuScan, Planting Spekboom in Kayamandi

CompuScan and Me Planting

 We ended up planting about 30 Spekboom trees to create a sort of garden perimeter in the middle of the sites. In the middle is a huge tree that was left in the middle and will look really great when it is summer here and the plants start blooming.

There has also been an increase in sales from the Techno Park promotional campaign which is great. We've sold about 75 trees at this point and its fantastic to see this business come into a revenue earning state.

Last week was focused on building and creation of the other space we have in the Kayamandi area known as the corridor. This consisted of one day of me and another girl cleaning out a building and then one day painting the space with the help of other inters - still a lot of work left but a really good start!

Before

Before

After

After

 Another highlight of the last few weeks was getting to spend some time working with a great businessman in Kayamandi, Songo. I had met him once before last year during my trip to Stellenbosch where he graciouslly gave a presentation about his work to our group. He created a BMX park / running area for the kids of the township. There they have a facility to do their homework then the chance to ride the bikes, learn tricks, participate in competitions, and even competitions in other cities and countries. Our Food Pods site is directly above (on a hill) the BMX park and we were building an access road between his park and our site.

http://www.songo.info/

Songo and I

Kids Riding at the BMX Park

As a second highlight from Friday - a team of interns and I got the chance to see a traditional Xhosa show with singing, dancing, and dinner called Amazink in Kayamandi later that night. It was an amazing show and to top it off one of our Food Pods growers is the manager and another the chef for the show. :)

Amazink Show in Kayamandi

The next week will be focused on collecting some of the plants and the payments from the Techno Park companies. I will also be mentoring the two new interns who will be taking over Wonder Plant once I leave so it will be a lot of transitioning, moving around final documents, and wrapping up the work that I have done here.