The Legacy That Lives On

The House Still Stands: Faith, Education, and the Work of Remembering

Jacoba’s story did not end with her final breath. It lives on through every student she taught, every life she lifted, and every act of service that followed her example. To her students she was “Mama Jacobi.” To her children she was compass and flame. To her communities in Zambia and Ukraine, she was a bridge between faith and reason, sorrow and strength, earth and heaven.

Even after her cancer diagnosis, she refused to retreat into silence. She returned to Zambia one last time to make sure the schools she had founded would continue under local leadership. “If I am to go,” she told her family, “let it be while doing what I was called to do.” Her resolve was not dramatic. It was quiet, firm, and deeply rooted in the belief that purpose does not die with the body. It carries forward in those who keep the work alive.

Today, her son Johan du Toit continues that calling in wartime Ukraine, teaching under sirens, guiding children through trauma, and writing the story of his mother’s faith while watching the same courage take root in another generation. The echo of her classroom now reaches across continents and decades. It speaks through chalk dust and candlelight, through whispered prayers and steadfast work.

Jacoba.org exists for this purpose, not as a shrine but as a living classroom of remembrance. It gathers her letters, lessons, and legacy, turning them into tools for hope. Her life shows that education and faith are not separate paths but one and the same: the act of lifting others toward light. For Jacoba, education was never simply the transfer of knowledge. It was the quiet work of redemption. Every lesson was an act of mending, every classroom a sanctuary for rebuilding what had been broken in the world and in the human spirit. She believed that teaching was sacred work, a way to restore dignity where it had been denied and to open windows of possibility where walls had stood too long. Her students did not just learn subjects; they learned to hope again. In her presence, learning became a kind of mercy.

Faith, too, was not ritual but breath, the quiet rhythm that sustained her when words and strength failed. It was the invisible pulse beneath her life, shaping how she loved, how she taught, and how she endured. Jacoba’s prayers were never loud; they were steady, woven into her work, her speech, and her silence. She believed that faith was not about proving belief but about living it, with humility, persistence, and grace. It was this faith that carried her from the farmlands of Benoni to the streets of Kyiv, through the years of apartheid, and into the arms of eternity.

And service was the melody her life kept playing. Not service for recognition, but the quiet obedience of one who knows her purpose and lives it daily. Jacoba’s story reminds us that love, when given faithfully and without condition, outlives violence, politics, and time. She showed that a woman from a small farm could change the world not through power but through presence, not through noise but through nurture. Her classroom never truly closed. It continues still in Zambia’s schools, in Ukraine’s shelters, and in the hearts of those who remember her, wherever someone chooses to teach, to love, and to believe that light can outlast the dark.