“It literally is as isolated as you can get in Africa, which is probably as isolated as you can get anywhere.”
For three weeks, he lived in a hut like most of the other villagers. But this wasn’t a village with a center, or even a store. The homes were spread out and scattered, and Gage wandered often. He was curious.
He realized something was missing. “I don’t see any vegetables anywhere. Any green vegetables. And I was there at the beginning of the planting, and they weren’t planting any of that stuff.”
The village had a small garden, maybe a quarter-acre, but it needed help.
“So we planted a garden and a woman managed it.”
He uses the term manager generally, in an American sense, to describe Nothembile, the woman. Translated, her role with the garden was closer to Boss Mama.
He taught Nothembile to work a treadle pump at the stream’s edge to fill watering cans, and she’d be there early most mornings, walking in place to power the pump.
Cattle grazed the grasslands, and he paid the village’s children a penny apiece to collect dry cow pies for fertilizer. “They might make a buck a day,” he said, “but that was a buck a day they didn’t have before.”
He left $100 for future fertilizer collection, and later, he would send a box of gardening tools to Africa to add to the sharpened sticks and cattle bones they’d been using.
Earl May Nursery, a longtime customer of Gage’s, donated thousands of seed packages to the Xhosa for several years. But the women have since learned how to collect and save seeds for the next planting.
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