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Boitumelo Leshope’s story began in Postmasburg, a modest mining town in South Africa’s Northern Cape. Her childhood was nomadic and shaped by her father’s work, as she changed schools more often than most. Yet, amidst the constant change, a few enduring truths were forged: the value of grit, the power of belief and the transformative promise of solid structures.
Her childhood memories read like poetry framed in the prose of resilience – living in RDP homes without electricity, the lingering smell on her uniform, pressed with a heavy cast-iron iron heated on a gas stove or open fire, braving long Christmas shopping trips to the nearest big cities, the anxiety of falling ill while being far from a private hospital, the joy of having her home join the power grid– and the novelty of eventually having a door on their shared bedroom.
“You can’t imagine the impact a simple door can have on a little girl’s worldview,” she muses, recalling how her sister’s friends joked that while they could slam doors when they were upset, she and her siblings had to settle for flinging a curtain aside.
