The Daily Bread Charitable Trust’s head office remained at the house in town. This was where my office was, although I visited the homes every other day to make sure the programmes were running smoothly and to take care of any arising emergencies. By now I had recruited my old friend Mrs Gush to work on the project. She was based at Deerfield Road, doing assessments of the children to help figure out who could be referred to social services and who could be sent home.

In Xhosa there is a saying, okungapheli kuyahlola. Indeed, life is change. In 1998, after eleven years of running the Daily Bread Charitable Trust, darkness approached.

I got my first taste of what was to come during a visit to Deerfield Road. I had been called in to address a complaint. When I got there, I asked the children to assemble in the dining room so that I could address them. Usually they would respond to such a request quickly and with discipline. This time, however, only two boys responded. The rest – about 140 of them – started singing and toyi-toyiing outside.

“What’s going on here?” I asked one of the house parents and Mrs Gush.

“I’m not sure,” was the reply. “Some people came and spoke to them about an hour ago. They’ve been impossible ever since.”

“Who were these people?”

Neither Mrs Gush nor the house parent knew.

“I have to go. Please tell the children I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk about this then.”

I thought the outburst would have blown over by the following day, but when I got there it was worse. The children had refused to attend class or assemble for a meeting. When I went out to talk to them, they said they were unhappy about how we managed the farm. They were especially unhappy about the white people who worked for the Daily Bread Charitable Trust. They took away the keys for the car I was using.

When eventually I got away, I discovered that the same thing was happening at the girls’ farm. There was chaos and protest wherever I turned, instigated by faceless accusers and carried out by children who had been appreciative of their care just days before.

Two days later, the children marched on the Daily Bread’s head office in town, armed with placards, toyi-toyiing and singing all the way. The crowd was unmanageable. Among them were a handful of adults wearing union T-shirts.

The situation at Daily Bread was becoming unstable. As a safety measure, Mrs Gush moved her office from the children’s home to my office in town. The managing committee met to resolve the crisis, but we couldn’t agree on a way forward. I felt confused. I had always believed that conflict and misunderstandings could be democratically resolved, but this was bullying, against which there is no argument.

By this time I was almost seventy years old. I was tired of fighting. All I wanted was peace, so I decided to remove myself from the troubled situation that had become the Daily Bread. Mrs Gush left the Daily Bread at the same time, both because of the union trouble and because her health was starting to fail. She had been unwell for some time by the time she stopped working at the end of November 1998. By the time I visited her early the following month, her condition had worsened. She died on the morning of 13 December. I missed her deeply for many years, and even today struggle to contain my impulse to mother her children, knowing how much she loved her two daughters after she lost her only son.

By the end of 1998 I was emotionally exhausted. I had lost one of the best friends I would ever know and watched something I had worked so hard to build be taken from me.

I decided to let the Daily Bread go and focus on the future. During my career, I had nursed babies between the ages of ten days and two years. The street children I worked with tended to be older, between the ages of eight and eighteen, most often young teenagers. I felt I was ready to focus on younger children, between the ages of two and six.

By now Sol and I had sold our house in Gompo township and bought a bigger one in a suburb of East London called Amalinda. The Amalinda house had lots of space, and the path that presented itself to me now was to open a day-care centre to provide the children of Duncan Village with a stimulating home environment and dedicated caregivers that would help plant the seeds for their future development during those all-important preschool years.

I completed a childcare course with the Department of Health and researched East London care centres. Sol and I renovated our house to convert the garage and car port into two classrooms with lovely big windows, and closed up our huge verandah to create a bathroom and an area where the children could play on rainy days. Outside we installed swings, a jungle gym and a sand pit, ready for little fingers and toes. Sol even built some furniture designed for little people.

By February 1999, the Laugh and Learn Educare Centre was ready to receive its first intake. At first we only accepted 25 children. It wasn’t long before the demand for the school grew to the point that I had to hire two new teachers. Sol and I also decided to move out, into another house, so that the whole Amalinda house could be used as a school. One of the sitting rooms was turned into a classroom and the other prepared for use as a computer lab.

In February 2009, I was blessed to be part of a programme called Second Chance Youth Skills, which aimed to give young men and women a “second chance” in life by giving them the work skills they would need to become gainfully employed. I served as the founding committee’s treasurer for three years, during which time I helped find a suitable venue for training.

Laugh and Learn is still going, helping to develop little minds, bodies and spirits. In 2012, to my surprise and delight, I received a visit from the two young brothers who had tugged at my heart when the Daily Bread first started. Their neighbour happened to be a parent of one of my students. We spoke, and they told me about their lives. The older brother had gone on to become a taxi driver, while the younger – who was thirty years old by now – had a tertiary education and was working at Haga Haga hotel in Alice. They both looked smart and mature, and I felt proud to have helped them along their journey.

I firmly believe that the crèche is playing a part, however small, in helping to build a better country. We teach the little ones self-reliance and prepare the older ones for “big school”. We teach all the children in their mother tongue, using indigenous games and dances, while also teaching them English. This gives them confidence in expressing themselves. We must be doing something right, because many of our former pupils, now adults and parents themselves, have brought their children to us. Unfortunately I began this centre late in life and my own grandchildren did not have the opportunity to attend.

Every time I watch these happy, innocent children, playing around my old home, a warm feeling of gratitude fills my heart. On occasion, when I am lucky, one of them will hug me around my knees with those short little arms and say, “I love you, Makhulu wam.”