Down to earth lessons

Looking at a newly planted garden filled with seasonal vegetables and herbs, Deborinah Talo said the only ones she recognised were beans and chillies.

The Solomons Island woman is one of a current group of RSE workers working in Marlborough vineyards. ‘‘It’s very new to us. It’s different varieties of plants, not the vegetables we’re used to eating,’’ Talo said.

‘‘We eat lots of vegetables and fruit back in the Solomon’s, but we don’t see them in New Zealand. We cook for ourselves, but we don’t use too many vegetables like this because they’re expensive, and we don’t eat them back home.’’

But thanks to the efforts of Marlborough support groups Talo and her fellow workers will soon be harvesting their own vegetables, as well as understanding the best ways to cook them.

Talo is one of a group of women who will benefit from the ‘‘Village to Village’’ project, which came about when a group of Enterprising Women With Purpose (EWWP) mentors realised more needed to be done for the RSE communities while they were here in New Zealand.

The project is seen as a way of giving back to the Pacific Island communities that support our horticultural and viticultural businesses every season, by creating a positive experience during their time in New Zealand and equipping them with skills to take back home.

EWWP director Catherine van der Meulen said they launched the Impact Education Programme last year, when they worked with a group of women from Vanuatu on its design. It took into consideration all the things they had natural passions, interests and skills for, and what their community needs and social issues were.

Where the workers had been focussed largely on the transport and hospitality industries in their own country, they were going home to a very different country post-Covid, Van der Meulen said. They needed to come up with other ways that they could continue to make an income when they went home.

The 12-week programme includes education on food cultivation and composting, cooking, computer and financial literacy, and business planning.

‘‘One of the ladies said she’d been coming to New Zealand for 13 years and this was the first time that she’d actually felt a part of the community, because we made them feel like they were part of our family,’’ Van der Meulen said.

‘‘They came to our home, we ate together, we cooked together, we took them out to the Marlborough

Sounds and went on adventures together, and really integrated them into our community.’’

‘‘We wanted to reinvigorate the programme while these ladies are here until February, and Hortus agreed that we could co-design a programme, so four weeks ago we came and spent some time with the ladies to really understand what they needed.’’

Last Saturday the new 12-week programme kicked off with the planting of a vegetable garden at Hortus where the women live.

Selmes Garden Trust chairman David Robinson was on hand to assist with the project.

‘‘We eat lots of vegetables and fruit back in the Solomon’s, but we don’t see them in New Zealand.’’

‘‘Because of the price of veggies in New Zealand they’re not really getting enough in their diets here, so the idea is to get them growing veggies that are available here and showing them how to use them in dishes that they like to cook,’’ he said.

The next stage will be supporting them with education for chicken farming, then health and nutrition to teach them how to use a lot of the vegetables, Van der Meulen said.

An important part of the Village to Village project was the setting up of a fund into which local wineries and businesses could invest, to support the women from an education perspective or to develop community or entrepreneurial projects when they return home, Van der Meulen said.