Meet our Crafters

Eva Williams: Founder

Eva Williams

After losing their land in Beaufort West, my father who had hit the road on foot with his elderly father on his back, eventually settled in Kylemore. So I grew up here, in a very close-knit family. Every evening my father would tell us stories from the family history followed by family prayers and singing of hymns, with my father playing the guitar and my mother the harp. The family sang bass, tenor, alt and soprano and at Christmas we went as a small choir to sing at the farm homesteads to earn some extra money with which my father then bought our school clothes for the new school year.

Although illiterate, my parents were upright people. My father was adamant that we should be schooled, my mother made our clothes herself, and in the holidays we children worked on the neighbouring farms to help with the family budget… besides helping around the house and chopping wood for the fire, very neatly stacked, since my father was a stickler for tidiness.

Today Kylemore is still ‘home of homes’ for me: it’s a little piece of heaven, a God-given haven here up against the mountains, where I can draw comfort in times of worry and distress. My children are all educated now, I am even a grandmother, and I work for the community both as a volunteer director of Imbali and as ward councillor.

I believe that everything in life fits into place as it should, often wonderfully so, like the day I met Jeanne Bloch and we gradually built Kylemore Imbali as our very own community project. At that stage a few of us used to get together in one another’s homes, for the joy of one another’s company and to teach one another the sewing skills that we had. Now, with all the training we have had, we can stand up and be proud of the beautiful work of our crafters which we send all over the world.

My dream for Kylemore is that every family lives in a proper house, not in backyard shacks, that the children are all at school and that the parents are rewardingly employed… and that all our streets are properly paved and beautifully lined with trees: this is what I work towards. And one day, maybe, I would like to complete my own schooling.