Siena Charles has spent two decades feeding her community – body, soul and spirit. She spoke to SMF News’ Ella Bosman about her life of service.
Siena Charles, founder of Beker en Bord Teetuin in Kylemore, has run soup kitchens and community feeding schemes in the Banhoek Valley for over two decades. PHOTO: Ella Bosman
She appears from behind the counter of the CoCreate Hub in Stellenbosch and opens her arms wide. The hub is humming, but Siena Charles moves through it all as though she has arrived somewhere quiet. Before a single question is asked, Tannie Siena pulls you into a hug. She is warm, smiling and wearing a black T-shirt stitched with the name of her business, Beker en Bord. She orders a hot chocolate, sits down, and wraps both her hands around the mug.
Born in the valley
Siena Charles, fondly referred to as “Tannie” (Afrikaans for aunt) was born in 1959 in her grandmother’s house in Kylemore, a small town of around 5 000 people tucked into the Helshoogte pass between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. She has never really left.
“I love Kylemore,” she says. “I love the mountains. I love the people. It’s quiet. Not like the townships. […] Everyone knows everyone. If something happens, the whole community comes.”
Her grandmother was a midwife who delivered babies across the valley for free, day or night. By age twelve, with her grandmother worn thin from night call-outs, she had taken over many household duties; cooking, cleaning and doing laundry so that when her grandmother came home at eight in the morning, there would be a meal waiting and a place to rest.
“That is where my cooking started,” she says. “My career.”
She pauses.
“And it never really stopped.”
For Siena Charles, founder of Beker en Bord, a tea garden in Kylemore, the name means more than cup and plate (its direct translation from Afrikaans). It is, she says, about forgiveness, joy and a second chance for people who walk through her gate. PHOTO: Ella Bosman
A hungry child, a new idea
By 2003, that cooking instinct had grown into something more formal. Siena started a soup kitchen in Kylemore, feeding residents who had no work, particularly through the brutal Western Cape winters.
This was inspired by something she witnessed while volunteering at a local school one afternoon. She had broken up a fight between two boys. One hadn’t eaten all day.
“I thought: ‘I must open something’,” she says. She went to the principal and proposed a breakfast kitchen where a child could eat something before class, and before the day demanded anything of them. A second soup kitchen followed at the high school. Siena ran both, alongside the growing idea in the back of her mind of something bigger.
In 2010, Beker en Bord Teetuin opened in her front yard. This Afrikaans name translates simply to ‘Cup and Plate Tea Garden’. But as Siena will tell you it means much more. She is a churchgoing woman, and in her church, the first Sunday of every month is communion.
“You go in, and whatever you have done wrong that month, the Lord forgives you,” she says.
“And then you must go and forgive other people. That is my business. I want forgiveness. I want joy. It’s like a second chance for people.”
The tea garden reflects this. Donated items hang from trees and are draped across the fences: parts of a bicycle, a rag doll, candle holders, old paintings. On a still morning, the smell of woodsmoke drifts in from where the roosterkoek are resting on the coals, and somewhere a pair of hadedas argue in the bluegum above the fence.
“I started my business with nothing,” Siena says. “People would throw away the stuff. I would go and pick it up and see what I can put there. Later, the community saw what I was doing, and they started bringing things. So it’s like the community is all a part of it.”
Today, guests book a day ahead and Visit Stellenbosch sends visitors her way. The three-course menu is fixed and traditional: roosterkoek with apricot jam and cheese, a main of tomato bredie served with white rice and beetroot salad, and homemade melktert to finish.
‘You are a mountain’
In 2012, Siena started an annual Women’s Day celebration. She says it has since become an institution in Kylemore.
The first rendition was started after she noticed women in the community struggling – retreating into habits like drinking, she says. These women were telling themselves that they did not matter, says Siena.
Siena wanted to tell them that something different was possible. So she organised a wedding: thirty-two women dressed up, make-up done, headdresses on, loaded into thirty-two borrowed cars and driven out to a farm for a photo shoot. Then back into Kylemore, into the community hall, where their families were waiting and the dancing began.
“I want to make the women know: you are a mountain. You are something, you are not nothing.”
The celebrations have continued every year since. Some of the women, she says, stopped drinking after that day. Some started showing up differently for their children. On Tuesday mornings, a prayer group still gathers at her home – women from the community, social workers, anyone with a problem to bring to the table.
“I don’t need to know what your problem is,” she says. “We bring all the problems together, and after that, everybody goes home.”
Beker en Bord Teetuin, opened by Siena Charles in her Kylemore front yard in 2010, is decorated entirely with donated and discarded objects from the community brought to her over the years. PHOTO: Ella Bosman
‘She is still with me’
In 2007, Siena lost her daughter to a car accident. Her daughter was seventeen. She and her mother had been planning the tea garden together, talking through how to take the cooking out of the kitchen and into the open air.
“She was already gone when I opened in 2010,” Siena says. “But we had talked about it. And every time I walk in there, I have a feeling she is with me. She is happy. I can see that happiness in all of it.”
She has four children in total: two boys and two girls, and 11 grandchildren. One son is a restaurant manager, and her daughter is a chef. The four-year-old grandchild, she says, already makes his own roosterkoek on the fire.
A fixed three-course menu of roosterkoek, tomato bredie and homemade melktert awaits guests at Beker en Bord Teetuin, the tea garden Siena Charles built from nothing in the heart of Kylemore on Helshoogte pass. PHOTO: Ella Bosman
Taking small businesses by the hand
In recent years, Siena’s connection to CoCreate Hub, Ranyaka’s entrepreneurship hub for small and township businesses in Stellenbosch, has helped stabilise what she built. The relationship began before the hub even opened its doors. Sonya Olivier, CoCreate marketing manager, recalls meeting Siena while the organisation was exploring opportunities to work in Kylemore.
Through the Nedbank-funded Proud of My Town programme, Ranyaka supported Siena’s annual Christmas parties for the children of Kylemore and assisted with repair and upgrade work in the kitchen where she prepares her meals. When the CoCreate Hub opened in 2021, Siena ran a food cart there for a while. But the team soon realised her energy would be better spent on something bigger. She is now able to focus on Beker en Bord.
“Maybe if I didn’t join, I wouldn’t have a stable business,” she says. She talks about the CoCreate team as family.
For Sonya, the roosterkoek was never really the point. “It’s the introduction of the bigger picture,” she says, “which is the charm of Beker en Bord and a seat at Siena’s table.”
“With every interaction, Siena teaches us what it means to care,” she says. “In a world that’s running at a million miles an hour, everyone is chasing opportunities. It’s a rare gift to journey with someone who takes the time to sit, listen, and converse.”
Siena is clear-eyed about what is still missing for small businesses like hers.
“There are a lot of people in my community making things: cakes, koeksisters, everything,” she says. “But people just don’t know about them. There must be somebody to take those people by the hand and show them. That is what is important.”
Siena Charles, an entrepreneur from Kylemore, learned to cook at age twelve, taking over her grandmother’s kitchen so there would be a hot meal waiting when her grandmother, a midwife, came home from delivering babies across the valley. PHOTO: Ella Bosman
Siena reaches for her phone and shows two photographs: one of a church choir in full colour, everyone in extravagant hats, Siena among them. The other is the Tuesday prayer group, seated in her home.
“Everything is here at Beker en Bord,” she says, tucking the phone away. “We are smiling. We are dancing. We love one another.”
Siena Charles, founder and owner of Beker en Bord Teetuin, built this tea garden in Kylemore from scratch. Once members of the community caught onto what she was doing, they started to contribute by donating odds and ends to help her decorate the garden. PHOTOS: Ella Bosman