One Young Woman on a Difficult Mission: Dimpho Siphoro
By Stephanie Hiller

Dimpho Siphoro (Photo courtesy Stephanie Hiller)

There's not much water in Lesotho, the tiny African nation located in the middle of South Africa. Once a week, when the water comes in, villagers can go to the community tap to fill their buckets. Yet the indomitable Dimpho Siphoro is going to start an ecovillage there.

Siphoro, 26, who is from the black township of Soweto, in South Africa, returned home in September 2004 after a six months stay in California, which included a summer internship at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland. There she studied permaculture and sustainable technologies with youth from around the world, and conceived the idea of creating an ecocenter in her homeland, a sort of sustainable bed and breakfast where young people and foreign travelers can share information about permaculture, natural building, solar, and other innovative technologies that sustain, rather than deplete, natural resources.

On her return home, a family crisis took her to her mother's village in the mountain country of Lesotho, where some of her uncles own their land; they agreed to make it available to Dimpho for her project.

It's not going to be easy. Lesotho is a very poor country where goods cost more than they do in California. But it is a travel destination; according to the web site Go2Africa.com, Lesotho "is a magical country where music and dance feature strongly in all rituals as well as everyday life." Known as "the kingdom in the sky," it's a great place for trekking on foot or by pony, or touring in a 4x4. Travelers come to stay in posh resorts with all the amenities, including "spectacular night's entertainment."

That is not exactly the way the people of Lesotho live. Although government workers do drive around in their 4x4s – to Dimpho's great annoyance—ordinary people scrape by with barely enough to eat.

Dimpho's ecovillage would allow travelers a very different view of life in Lesotho. Visitors would experience first hand the obstacles people are up against – and participate in their brave efforts to create a better life using techniques that are actually indigenous to the country. Straw-bale housing, for example, is the native method of building in South Africa, and people—primarily women—have been growing natural foods for centuries.

Straw bale is easy and cheap. At the Solar Living Institute, she told me, when I met her this summer, "We built a house in just one week, and there were only 20 of us."

She described her internship as "the most wonderful time of my life, challenging, so educational, and very inspiring. As interns, we didn't know each other before, and we sort of educated one another, opening the boundaries of understanding what's around.

"Growing our own food, working with the soil – at the end of the day, the Earth gives back."

After the internship, Siphoro spent a week learning more about solar technology from Ralph Pisciotta, who has a solar installation business in Willets. The rest of her time here was full of activity. She talked at the Rural Alliance, who awarded her $500 to buy a pump for the community garden, at high schools and at a meeting of Alliance for Democracy in Fort Bragg. She helped Alice Kibwaa with a benefit to build an AIDS clinic in Kenya held at the Community Baptist Church in Santa Rosa – a benefit that provided the extra dollars to finish the health center this summer. Siphoro was interviewed by Kris Welch on KPFA and Dawn Pillsbury of Sonoma West. She traveled to San Quentin's Death Row to visit Dennis Mayfield Brewer, a talented African artist whom Siphoro had met in 1999.

At a talk she delivered at the Grange Hall in Bodega Bay last August, Siphoro spoke of the way apartheid continues to operate in South Africa, and how so many South Africans have become convinced that the white way – and particularly the American way – is the best. "Because white people keep getting richer, people think you have to be like them. If you don't look like an American, you're no good. The media is all about Americans so they lose their esteem for their own culture." The revolt against apartheid began when the Boer government stopped the schools from teaching classes in the native language. "The language, that's the culture," said Siphoro, and people are forgetting their own language now as well.

"We are living a lie," she said. "We are not a rainbow nation. We are still segregated." Gated communities in the cities require an ID. "What the difference from the passes we had to carry during apartheid," Siphoro asks.

Siphoro's visit to the United States – her third – was sponsored by long time Sonoma County activist Mary Moore, who met Dimpho and her brother on a trip to a women's conference in Johannesburg in 1998, where Moore presented her slide show about the Bohemian Grove. Moore's network of activist friends helped pay Dimpho's airfare and other expenses while she was here. She stayed in Mary's home in Camp Meeker.

"For years I've always said you can't heal the world one by one, you've got to get to the source of the problem," said Mary Moore, 70, "but I feel I've done more bringing Dimpho here than in all those years of protests."

Dimpho Siphoro needs some seed money to make her ecovillage a reality. She has raised more than $2000 so far. If you can help her get funding, please e-mail Mary Moore, or contact Dimpho directly at ubuntuinsoweto@yahoo.com.

Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman e-magazine, online at www.awakenedwoman.com and a contributing editor for NBP.