Janine and Gav of Kokiville homestead

Tell us a little about yourself!

Gav and I are originally from Johannesburg. We moved to Nelspruit 8 years ago.  When our daughters left university, we wanted to do something different with our lives and knew we did not want to live in a big city like JHB any longer.  We had always travelled to Nelspruit as we have good friends that live here.  The chance to buy a piece of land came up and we decided to give it a go.  The land had beautiful sections, but it was also land that was previously used to illegally mine sand for road construction.  Parts of the land needed to be rehabilitated as it looked like a moon scape.  We were positive we could accept the challenge and make a difference to this piece of land and build a life for ourselves.

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

We just started!  We bought the land, and the original idea was to build a house on the land.  Little did we know that our plans would change to create a thriving little business. 

After we bought the land, Gav was going to move down and start the building process.  He was going to live in a tent while he was putting the basic infrastructure in and until we could afford to build our house.  While celebrating an anniversary in Parys, we came across a 1973 School bus on the side of the road.  It had been converted from a school bus into a pub bus and was now for sale.  We spent the weekend thinking about how converting the bus to live in may be a better option rather that living in a tent. We bought the bus by the end of the weekend and fetched her two weeks later.  It took Gav 9 months to convert her in JHB in my parents’ driveway and we then took Patsy to Nelspruit.  It took us 9.5 hours to drive from JHB to Nelspruit, (normally takes 3 hours) and Patsy was home for 4 years. I had to live and work in JHB while Gav lived and worked on building the basics and discovering our farm.  Covid hit and I was then able to work from home and so was able to move to Nelspruit permanently. 

What we learnt by living in the bus is that we really did not need all the stuff or the space that we originally thought.  We also realised that building something like this took lots of money and that we did not have a big enough pension, so our plans changed from wanting to just build a house to build a business.  We moved to a slightly bigger ‘tiny home’ and we began to rent out Patsy on Airbnb and this was the catalyst for us to build a few more rooms.  We did not want a gewoone guest house though.  We wanted to provide alternative getaway experiences, so we converted the shipping container that we had brought our worldly possessions from JHB in to two other rooms to add to our guest house and we have recently added a Tipi.

In this process, our mindsets changed so much we realised the massive part we could play to make a difference to our ecosystem, which includes people.  We also realised how vital creativity was, we realised that everything we did was creative despite not being artists.  This is where Kokiville as born – Conscious Creative Living.  Aspiring to be as self sufficient as possible, creating experiences that leave people feeling better than when they arrived and showing that creativity is so much more than just art.  We love what we do and enjoy that we are building a life we don’t need a holiday from.

We have a 360m2 food garden in the middle of the bush, we are still learning how to grow food, and our orchard still has a long way to go but we have persevered and we are getting to the point where we are able to eat nicely from our garden.  We are not self-sufficient and don’t think we will ever be.  We cannot slaughter animals, and I am not allowed to get a cow ☹ (Gav can be mean LOL) What we do to make us for this is to support small local farmers where we are not able to produce our own.  At this point we do still rely too much on supermarkets but every day we make small changes to make better choices.  We are a busy guest house and do a lot of laundry, we use a lot of water, we recycle our water into grey water ponds for use for irrigation.  We are completely off the grid.  We collect 400000 litres of water off all the roof space at Kokiville and we sell some of our fresh produce (at the moment only eggs – multicoloured).  We have sold honey in the past and we encourage our guests to pick from our food garden when they are staying here so that they can taste how delicious fresh organic vegetable are.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

We are most proud of our ability to be open to change and to make it happen.  We are proud of the space that we have created where people comment how much they feel healed and peaceful as a result of being here.  We are proud that we have had a huge change of heart and are living what we preach

What is the most helpful piece of advice you received when you were just starting out? 

It was not so much advice but the response from our friends when we told them what we were about to do.  There was so much support and encouragement.  The excitement of our friends motivated us to keep going.

What advice would you like to give to others who are younger/earlier on their journey? 

Do your research but not too much.  Just start somewhere!  Never, never give up.  If we can so can you!

Where do you see growing going in South Africa? 

As a community we have so much knowledge and tenacity (growing food and business takes tenacity) we can play a big part in showing people what is possible.