85 Japanese Volunteers work party in Ocean View

[Liesel James]

Sunday 7 November 2010, 85 Japanese volunteers from all ages and professions accompanied by a rock band called Funkist have saved up for one year to come to South Africa.

Their mission is to plant trees and implement vegetable gardens all around our country.They started their 2-week journey in the South Peninsula by extending the vegetable garden at Marine Primary in Ocean View.

It was like characters from a movie stepping out of the bus and energy emerged from nowhere. Local residents where hanging out of their windows from across the road watching these friendly foreigners digging and cleaning in
their neighborhood.

Amongst them was also the Earth Walker, Paul Coleman who has since 1990 walked 47,500 km through 39 nations delivering the environmental message while on a mission to plant 100,000,000 trees, one for every man, woman and child killed in the last century of war. 11,350,00 trees have now been planted with the help of friends and supporters around the world. Visit www.earthwalker.com for more information. (picture 8 is Paul with Funkist)

This was an exhilarating day and we had a schedule planned whereby the group was divided into different groups doing the following: clearing all rubble and waste which was piled up in old tyres and then buried by sand of a trench that was dug out. This is part of a an amphitheater and once it is finished; will be used for the children to sit on during life science lessons. This is one way of dealing with waste instead of sending it to landfill. Numerous holes were dug to plant great sized trees
that were sponsored. There were also seeds planted into plastic containers and
3 beautiful heart shape beds lay out and planted with seedlings.We had children from Ocean View helping and the Japanese volunteers loved the interaction and help from the kids who happily came to help out in the garden on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Sadly we did have an incident where one of the cameras were stolen at the end of the work party but quickly recovered by one of our team members Beau Horgan who managed to get the culprit with the help of some of the local children. The camera was returned to the Avataar girl the following day at the next work-party in Khayelitsha. (pic 6 is of Avataar girl and Beau Horgan). Even though this seems like a negative, it was great to see the community working together and expressing their ill feelings towards this incident. After taking the child to the police station we had decided not to lay charges but rather to involve the child into the garden. He has to do community service for the rest of the year by working in the garden at school and has to attend all environmental events for the next 3 months. We are hoping to rehabilitate him in some way by spending positive time together.

This is the second year that Japanese volunteers have come to South Africa to help our communities and their itinery and stay has been facilitated by Food and Trees for Africa. We are extremely grateful for their thankless commitment to sustainable development across South Africa's undeserved communities.

We would like to thank all the Little Green Fingers of Ocean View and Retreat who helped us before, during and after this work party.

All picture where taken by Liesel James founder of Little Green Fingers and contractor for Food and Trees for Africa in the Western Cape and has been facilitating this vegetable garden project since November 2009. If there are any volunteers interested to help out at Marine Primary please contact Liesel on 071.198 7875

Photos available - click photos, then click album.