Dan and Rachel Splaingard are beginning to feel at home in Greenwood.
The couple moved to the Delta about a month ago from Cape Town, South Africa, where they had resided for the past two years.
Dan and Rachel relocated to work with Greenwood husband and wife Richard Elliott and Emily Roush-Elliott and their recently established nonprofit business Delta Design-Build, where Dan is now working as an architect.
“Emily and Richard are our friends, and we’ve been in touch with them for the last couple of years,” said Dan. “I think the work they are doing is interesting, and I called them up when we were still in Cape Town and said, ‘We are looking to move somewhere in the region. Do you have suggestions?’ and they said, ‘Come work here with us.’
“I thought it would be great to work with peers rather than at a corporation. As an architect, it’s nice to work at a smaller scale with colleagues.”
The couple also picked this area because they wanted to live in a small town and also live near Dan’s brother, sister-in-law and their children, who reside in Jackson.
Dan is originally from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, which is right outside Milwaukee, and Rachel grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. Dan lived in Alabama while attending Auburn University, and Rachel has lived in South Dakota and New York City.
The two met and married while they were both living in Chicago. From there, they moved to Cape Town, where Dan was studying architecture in graduate school and Rachel did volunteer work as a community garden coordinator.
“I really enjoyed it,” said Rachel. “I studied social work in school, so it sort of let me be a social worker farmer, and I found a lot of hope in the work.”
Some of the community garden work also included a job program, which largely involved the homeless and unemployed of the area. Rachel said she hopes she can do a similar job-related program locally.
“I love being a community organizer, and I also really loved planting things and helping them grow,” she said.
Rachel, a deaconess in the United Methodist Church, said a pastor once told her that a gardener isn’t someone who makes plants grow; it’s someone who provides the best environment possible for a plant to grow or a seed to develop.
“I think that’s also true of social work,” she said. “You just try to create this environment for a person to live and flourish and develop. So I look forward to sort of combining those two things together.”
Before her work in Cape Town, Rachel worked as a community organizer in Chicago and worked with United Methodist churches that wanted to be more inclusive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. The work she did in Chicago even took her to Jackson, where she did training for metro-area churches interested in being more inclusive of the LGBT community.
In Chicago, Dan was involved with government-funded public housing architecture projects.
The lack of a localized workforce in some of those projects led him to studying in Cape Town.
“I was studying a few architectural projects that I think are impressive projects that have utilized South Africa’s public works program to put people to work and to also make beautiful buildings,” he said. “That was, I think, a unique context to study that in South Africa, and I really enjoyed that. Some of the work that Emily and Richard do involves job training and a more localized workforce, which I think is interesting.”
Along with his work as an architect with Delta Design-Build, Dan will also be teaching a youth Art + Design class at ArtPlace Mississippi.
Dan and Rachel are excited to be involved in their new community. They recently enjoyed a Mission Mississippi meeting and are avid patrons of the Greenwood Farmers Market.
“We’ve been eating really well,” said Dan. “The other night we made catfish tacos with catfish from Itta Bena, collard greens we got in Indianola and sweet potatoes, and it was impressive to eat something so delicious made with mostly local ingredients.”
Both are also enjoying exploring their new environment, visiting the Turnrow Books and the Greenwood-Leflore Public Library. They are also looking for a church to attend.
“What we are hoping to find in a church is one that is active, because we feel inspired and challenged by the life of Jesus,” said Rachel.
On a recent late-summer evening, to get more acquainted with Greenwood, the couple drove around downtown and then began driving down U.S. 49. When they spotted a basketball court to the side, they decided to pull over and shoot some hoops.
“There were two families already there and a whole bunch of kids, and we just went shooting basketball, and the kids starting coming over and playing basketball with us,” said Dan. “It was really nice, because we were strangers. I like places like that where you can just get to know people. There’s not many places like that.”
• Contact Ruthie Robison at 581-7233 or rrobison@gwcommonwealth.com.
