Bio
I am first and foremost a wife and mother. My sons are Travis and Tristan and they are 3 and 13 years old respectively.
My husband, Kevin, is a giant among men and his love and support have given me the freedom to be anything I choose to be.
My background is in Advertising and I have been fortunate enough to have worked on great SA brands such as SAA, MTN, Coca Cola, OMO and Zulu Kingdom, amongst others.
I am passionate about my province and my career highlight to date was promoting travel to the Zulu Kingdom in my capacity as GM: Marketing Communications for the province.
Other career highlights have been travelling the globe promoting tourism to South Africa.
I am currently finalising my MBA: Strategic Marketing and work as a Brand and Marketing Specialist to key clients. Future plans include growing my new company, which is an outdoor media and marketing solutions venture.
I grew up on a farm on the Natal South Coast with very humble beginnings. My family home had no electricity or running water, with the ablution block in the fields behind our huts. We kept our huts warm by polishing our floors and walls with cow dung.
Whilst we bathed daily in little buckets, our weekly scrub down was done in the river adjacent to our property. To this day my friends from school call me River Girl.
My Dad ran a General Dealer and sold fruit and vegetables from our orchard and garden. We also sold eggs, chickens and milk and took it in turns to milk our cows and goats each morning.
Because we lived in such a remote area, called Hlokozi, we had to walk 11 kilometres to the main road to catch the school bus. I went to a Convent School in Ixopo on the South Coast named Little Flower School.
I have six sisters and seven brothers, so new clothing for me meant my sisters had outgrown theirs. Regardless of this they felt very new to me at the time. We ate chicken only on Sundays but enjoyed such a full life in so many other ways. You could say we were dirt poor but to me we were rich in ways you could never imagine.
My Dad followed a life of politics and moved us to Wentworth in Durban, the most notorious coloured suburb in KwaZulu-Natal. Suddenly, I spoke English and realised I was in fact Coloured and not an African as I had always known I was. Thank Goodness my Dad continued to converse with us in Zulu throughout my youth.
I learnt different coping skills from living amongst gangsters and rapists but I would never trade a minute of those years either. My Dad being a politician in the struggle meant we had our home bombed and had to run for cover every so often, but even in that there were lessons to be learnt.
I learnt that freedon was not free and came with a huge price and that people gave their lives for me to have the opportunities I have today. Because of this, I take nothing for granted. I am eternally grateful for every opportunity and have found that everything I put my mind to, I have achieved because there were no hand-outs or special favours.
Even having an education was a luxury and I put myself through school and college as my Dad could not afford to send all 13 of us to school. I worked during the day and studied at night to ensure I had a chance at success. I was not going to land up just packing groceries or meat at the local grocers like all my sisters and having dozens of kids from men who half beat them to death - I was going to be somebody one day!
Being on The Apprentice was a lifelong dream come true - I was on TV!!!!!! What an amazing journey my life has been and being on the show was just the cherry on top!
I did this for every person in South Africa who feels that being on TV is for only a selected few, who like me grew up thinking that packing groceries at the till point in our resident Spar Supermarket was the ultimate job. You can be as big as you make up your mind to be. Don't let your past be an excuse not to have a great future.
I want to maximise my being on the show by talking to every young person in South Africa, about the endless opportunities this amazing country has to offer.
Look at me now ..... I was once just a "River Girl"!