Cape Town - It’s 6.30pm in the Company’s Garden and there is an air of expectation. Amid the joggers and the people walking down the avenue heading out of the city after work, small groups of people gather chatting and joking.
Every so often their eyes turn to the entrance of the garden at Adderley Street. They’re waiting for a bakkie driven by someone they know as “ma”, and with her the steaming pot of either bredie or soup.
The bakkie’s late this evening, though. Michael Bublé is playing at the Cape Town Stadium and cars are streaming into the city. But just after 7pm it arrives and there is a ripple of excitement.
Venetia Orgill emerges and is greeted with hugs and smiles.
“It’s Miss Company’s Gardens,” jokes Edgar Vercueil. “I’ll travel far to see her.”
Vercueil used to live on the street, but thanks to Orgill, who has been feeding the city’s homeless every Thursday evening for a year now, he has a job and a place to stay.
“She just walked into our lives and loved us from the beginning,” Vercueil explains.
The Cape Argus first interviewed Orgill, who is a florist, nearly a decade ago when her son Troy was on drugs.
Orgill and a group of other Cape Town mothers and grandmothers started a support group to try to deal with what the tik epidemic was doing to their children.
They opened up about how they could barely recognise their own children when they were high and violent on drugs. Others had lost their children through overdoses and were trying to cope.
The story was seen by South African film-maker Lindokuhle Mnyandu. He later made a documentary called Families Under Attack which featured Orgill and won Best Documentary in Africa at the 4th Abuja International Film Festival in Nigeria in 2007.
Sadly Troy, although he had stopped drugs, committed suicide at the age of 27 in 2008.
But Orgill continued her journey, helping other parents in similar circumstances. And now she has turned her attention to Cape Town’s homeless.
It started one evening when her friend, Erica Samson, accompanied her to a city hotel to deliver some flowers.
One of Samson’s son’s had been on the streets for nine months and they had heard rumours he may be in town.
“We went to chat to some of the guys and, amazingly, they knew him and helped us find him,” says Orgill.
He has since returned home, quit drugs and has a permanent job.
Orgill also found her own brother-in-law who had been on the streets for 20 years. She’s hoping to persuade him to return home.
She said there were people from all walks of life living rough.
“You must see the (university) degrees in here,” she says pointing to the Company’s Garden.
Orgill has photographs of some of her success stories on her phone and knows everyone’s name and circumstances.
“They told me they miss ‘mommy food’ so Erica and I decided to cook and bring it to them every week.”
In 2013, the Arch at St George’s Cathedral, one of Cape Town’s oldest soup kitchens, closed its doors after running out of funds and volunteers. They served meals to 300 people every week day since the mid-1970s.
Orgill and Samson usually feed between 140 and 160 people every Thursday, although it has risen to 200 on occasion.
People queue while Orgill and Samson ladle out portions from her bakkie.
Orgill greets everyone by name. Some ask for a quick meeting with her afterwards.
“Sometimes people just want to get something off their chests and talk. They come for the love, not just the food.”
This week she is taking 30 homeless people to a campsite in Strandfontein for a “family and restoration week”.
“I put a call out to friends of Facebook for R120 per person and the money is slowly trickling in,” she says.
In the past year she has helped 10 people get off the streets. “They’re clean and they have their lives back,” she says.
And it’s what keeps her coming back.
Cape Argus