As we continue with our coverage of the macadamia nut harvesting, today we introduce to you one of Tree of Life’s longest serving and dedicated workers, Linda Malindzisa. Our relationship with Linda goes a long way back and extends beyond just work but also as fellow labourers in the kingdom of God. He first arrived on our shores back in the year 1999 when we were still operating as Manzini Bible School and has been pastoring the Ebenezar Church of Christ for some time now. He studied for the next two years and in 2001 he joined us to work in our maintenance department until 2012. He left us that year, but as they say – home is where the heart is – he re-joined us in 2014 under the Tree of life project. Ever since then he has been one of our faithful workers who gives his all in whatever task he is assigned to do.
We took time to meet with him, and as humble as he always is, he welcomed the invitation to chat with us. When we met him he was offloading nuts that had been collected from the farm and weighing them in a scale. As you will remember from our previous post that we pick nuts that have fallen from the trees, the harvesters put them into sacks and then someone comes to take those sacks somewhere else. Well, Linda is the one who does that. He moves around the farm to make sure that every full sack is taken back to the farmhouse for weighing and dehusking – a process we will cover in due time. He weighs the nuts, records the weight of each sack in a tiny book and take to Thoko Mdluli who then feeds that information to the computer. This task of weighing and recording helps to know how much harvest we got. Imagine if we just took the nuts from the farm and dehusked them without weighing; we would not be able to do our evaluation at the end of the year in terms of the amount of harvest we got as compared to previous years.
After the nuts have been weighed, they are poured into the dehusking machine where there are people waiting for them to continue the work. Linda did narrate to us how hardworking the harvesters are. To emphasize his point, he told us of a time when he once went to pick nuts. “I can’t match the work that the harvesters are doing,” he says in a humble and well-meaning way. He praised the effort they put in making sure that deadlines are met and lauded their spirit. Indeed, we were able to witness the work first-hand as we moved around with him and interacted with the harvesters – though being cautious not to disturb the work.
As we elucidated in the previous post that there is still a lot of work to be done in the nut processing, Linda takes care of another part which is also as crucial as any. We will continue with telling the story of what happens in the farm and how the workers are contributing to the work we do here at African Christian College. To God be the glory.