"You met me in the mill when the black cat mewled, and lay with me in the moonlight on the tow sacks of meal our daddy had ground by day".
Lacking jerseys in the Diepkloof township, a part of Soweto, he and his friends gathered sacks of mealie meal, a grain staple.
Three products stand out from the sales figures at the Pick n Pay store nearest his office, says Mr Roberts: a 25kg sack of maize meal, a working-class staple; the bread baked in-store ("not the cheapest"); and bars of Lindt, a luxury chocolate.
Maggie O'Donnell, the president of the project's contractor, SFS Chemical Safety Inc., is looking for a place to store the 1.1-ton sacks of fishbone meal being shipped in from processing plants in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
The narrow, two-lane road simply ends in muddy water in the town of Palmeira, forcing villagers to slog through the waist-high tide to carry sacks of corn meal to friends and relatives on the other side.
At dusk the roads are lined with men and women, some with firewood or sacks of mealie-meal on their shoulders, tramping home to townships many miles away.
The words describing a simple act the passing of meal in sacks by aid workers onto a trailer in the title poem, "Human Chain", transform this 12-line poem into a kind of parable.
The sacks of meat were so cold.
Yet Mr. Toro continues to volunteer at La Iglesia Evangélica Española, a church where hundreds of people go each week for a hot meal and a sack of groceries.
After showing off his own bag (parachute cord, a bivy sack, a two-week supply of Meals Ready to Eat), Mr. Charles, a New York City firefighter, told the group that he had just bought a dog.
