Page Tools

Nomvuzo Nopote says she is a doer, not a dreamer.

The 36-year-old South African woman surveys her rural village with the eye of a civil engineer, describing the community’s various challenges.

“We have many needs in the village of Roma. We are using paraffin for light in the darkness. We

Nomvuzo Nopote

have no proper sanitation, our roads are bad, and our one school in the village is old and dangerous. It has cracks in the mud walls and could fall on the children at any time,” said Nopote, who received no formal education beyond the seventh grade.

“But things are slowly changing here. I serve on the steering committee that will help bring water to the community so we won’t have to fetch our drinking water from a nearby river. That project is now well under way.”

Nopote’s organizational skills are recognized by many of her 500 fellow villagers, but her rise to leadership has taken more than a decade.

A year after her nation’s first fully democratic election in 1994, Nopote joined with 13 neighbor women whose hearts also welled with hope at the possibilities of improving their community. They created a small nonprofit organization called Zanemvula, which means “bringing rain” in the Xhosa language. Their aim was to encourage local people to address local problems so their village could blossom like a rain-soaked flower.

Nopote, the mother of four children ages 7 to 16, knew the goal would not be obtained quickly or easily because their community, located in the Eastern Cape province, had entrenched poverty and an unemployment rate higher than 50 percent.

As a result, the women’s group started simply; they created communal gardens as a way to feed their families. But Nopote and her friends soon began tackling other projects, including petitioning the national Department of Education for a new school, and working with local officials to provide communal tap water for the first time. While neither project has been completed, both are moving forward.

There is another initiative that Nopote is determined to see through to fruition. In the past year, she was selected to represent her community as part of a provincial delegation that met with Department of Land Affairs officials to discuss participation in the nation’s land acquisition program.

Nopote’s desire is to secure 200 hectares (approximately 480 acres) for a farm cooperative so Roma residents can put food on their tables and sell the surplus. In addition to vegetables and fruits, villagers would like to raise chickens, goats, sheep and possibly cattle.

After collecting endorsements from the tribal chief and 15 farmers who would compose the co-op, Nopote completed the formal application process and is awaiting government direction about what steps are required next.

She admits that community infrastructure changes have not come as quickly or as comprehensively as she and the others had hoped, yet a transformation has come in other ways.

“The people here in Roma had been marginalized, but now we are able to engage with government departments confidently and say what our community needs."

“My life has changed greatly because of my community involvement. I’ve learned that sitting down without doing anything about your needs will not help. As individuals and as a community, we need to stand up in order to change our lives.”