Bulungula Village

We have spent the last three days in the tiny little rural village of Bulungula, right on the Indian Ocean.  There is a small lodge here, a project that was started by an NGO about 10 years ago to help give local employment and bring in a little bit of money.  Now the village runs the lodge themselves, and it serves as a community center for the local young people, a place for village entrepreneurs to create and sell their wares and services, and a hostel for visitors.  There is no electricity in the village, so everything is run by solar power or, in the case of the showers, by liquid fuel that we light by hand to get hot water.  The toilets are composting, so have two containers, one for solid and one for liquid.  The community center itself has a kitchen where the local ladies cook lunch and dinner, and make the most amazing local Xhosa bread.  This bread is made in huge loafs, circular, about two feet across.  They are cooked in the fire, so have a smoky taste in the crust.  The bread is chewy and flavorful, and crusty on the outside.  They sell it by the huge slice (for about 15 cents) and it’s incredibly delicious!

The lodge is up on a hill, probably once a large sand dune.  All around us are high and very rounded hills, covered in green grass and dotted with small traditional thatch roof roundhouses in small clusters.  There is no town center, the whole town is spread over several miles of hills with lots of grass and woods and gardens and amazing views in between.  Our lodge is at the confluence of a snaky slow tidal river as it meets the Indian Ocean.  The sound of waves is constant, and there is the smell of salt water in the air.  It’s incredibly green here, with the grounds covered in grass with small bumpy hillocks and cow and goat dung everywhere.  Animals wander freely in this village, including at the lodge, so in the morning a persistent rooster starts crowing well before the break of dawn.  Chickens roost up on the aloe bushes. Cows wander by, goats and baby chicks are underfoot.  There is a small pack of dogs that hang out at the lodge, several of whom are especially friendly, and one of whom follows us everywhere, including canoeing today.  We’ve been calling this dog Henry, and he apparently followed a group of beach hikers here last week and has just stuck around. 

We are staying in small traditional roundhouses, with thatch roofs and dung floors.  The floors are so finished that they feel like concrete, but really are made of the traditional dung. There are a few roundhouses that have huge whale vertebrae to use as chairs.  The doors are the traditional half-doors, with a top and a bottom.  The local people keep the bottom part shut against animals but leave the top open all day for the light and the air.  The only concession to modernity is the single lightbulb hanging from the center of the thatch ceiling. It gets dark quickly and there is no lighting outside, so we carry our flashlights with us everywhere.  There’s a lovely fire pit with benches around it, and every night they light a fire.  On the night we arrived, a local young man sat and played a traditional drum, which was really fabulous!

Dinner here is one choice, and is mainly traditional cooking, although they always have a meat and vegetarian option of the same dish.  We've had a sweet and spicy lamb stew, a kind of sausage stew served over the local lumpy and sticky beans, and large fish meatballs.  They have a cooler with drinks, and we are on the honor system to mark down what we take and pay as we leave.  There is instant coffee and tea and rooibos, the South African red tea.  We’ve had free time each afternoon for walking on the beach, swimming, or getting a massage or going horseback riding (which are both local entrepreneurial businesses).   It’s so incredibly beautiful here, it’s a little bit like an actual paradise. 

This area of South Africa is called the Transvaal, and it’s a former homeland for the Xhosa people under Apartheid.  This is the place where many Xhosas were forcibly sent when they were removed from other areas of South Africa, and it functioned a bit like a Native American reservation.  People were contained here, and there were very few resources and little education.  The current government is slowly trying to address the remaining social problems, and schools have been built, including a big new secondary school in Bulunugula that will open soon.  Electricity is coming out here within the next year.  

The same NGO that helped open the lodge also helped create a nursery/early primary school here, which is now funded by the government. We had a chance to visit the school today.  About 40 local young children are educated there, in both early learning and social development skills.  We got to tour several classrooms (each in a traditional roundhouse), and we saw the library, which is incredibly well-stocked and organized, as several volunteer groups from the US and Europe have adopted the school.  The teachers are almost all local young people, who were educated and now have found jobs back in their own community.  We could see how incredibly passionate they are about their mission.  Part of the project of the school is to also help educate parents about healthy child-raising, which is important in an area where more than 90% of the adults are uneducated.  This is one of the poorest areas in South Africa. 

As I’m writing this, we have a group of students sitting at the fire pit out in the sun, and we have another group, with Mariam, walking with our guide along the beach for a long afternoon walk.  We have a few others desperately trying to do laundry by hand in the big plastic tub they let us borrow.  A few of the students have hired one of the local village masseuses for a quick massage.  We all woke up early this morning to see the sunrise from the beach, while a local woman made us all crepes and served them on the beach.  It was glorious.  And then, later in the day, we saw people gathering on one of the hills across the river from us.  It was a funeral, and the first thing they do is gather all the family while the men dig the grave.  They were out there for hours.  The funeral continues over the next several days, and, really sadly, we learned that the person who died was the sister of the woman who cooked us pancakes this morning.  The sister was young, and it was a sad death, or so we were told.  That put some things in perspective for a lot of us.  Imagine, having so few economic opportunities that even on the day of your sister’s funeral, you still have to do a big job because the income is so important to you.  I think a lot of students are finding it challenging to think about this, and I know I am too. 

We visited a local healer today, a Sangoma, who uses traditional herbs and beliefs to treat medical, emotional, and psychological symptoms.  That’s one of the more interesting things we have learned, that people here consider any unbalance or unhappiness to be part of an illness that might be treated by a Sangoma.  Of course, a Sangoma can’t treat everything, and the local healer here will send people on to a hospital or clinic if need be.  In fact, yesterday we saw a dusty old ambulance drive up—no lights or sirens—and learned it was here to transport a teenager who fell of a horse and broke his arm.  He had been sitting with us, arm in a sling, in obvious pain, for hours before the ambulance arrived.  Tomorrow we are visiting an institute of traditional healing, where a local professor has made a practice of systematically tracking, testing and categorizing local herbal and folkloric healing knowledge. 

We’ve had the chance to visit a local woman, who along with a friend, showed us how to paint our faces with traditional mud patterns (for sunscreen as it turns out!).  We also learned how to tie up our hair in colorful scarves, and pick greens and cooks them up for lunch.  First we had to carry the water on our heads (universally unsuccessfully) and then gather firewood for the fire.  By that time, the greens and pap (polenta) certainly tasted good!

We go on from here to the Kgalalgadi (Kalahari) via a transit overnight in Johannesburg.  Our first night there we will be sleeping out in tents with a bushman family, and will not have internet.  We don’t know if we will have internet after that.  Once we leave the Kalahari area, we will be in Cape Town and will have internet the whole time (and the blog will be current).  It will be hard to leave our little paradise tomorrow, it will be hard to leave behind these amazing people and experiences, and it will be really hard to leave “our” dog Henry too!