Bulungula

For all of you who have been groaning about me not blogging, I have heard your cries (haha). For the past week and a half our group has travelled up the East coast of South Africa, passing through Port Elizabeth, stopping in East London, and spending sometime in Bulungula (a traditional Xhosa village in rural South Africa). Bulungula is an interesting and very beautiful place. The community operates on no electricity (the few that do use solar panels and a generator), no water lines (resulting in water borne illnesses leading to young deaths), and no gas lines. Many of us think this would be a hard lifestyle to live (which in some ways can be true) but I found it to be a nice change of pace. Here there is not much emphasis on time and you live more in the moment. The village is located right off the Indian Ocean and since it is further up the coast than Cape Town, the water is much warmer. The community makes the majority of their money off of tourism. There is a lodge (a cluster of mud huts and a large building for meals) that houses all of the tourists (the lodge can hold up to 40 people). The community owns 40% of the lodge and it has created lots of jobs for this community. Not many people are able to speak English, so I had to pull out my limited Xhosa vocabulary (all of about 5 words to be exact). Hand gestures, body language, and smiles can communicate a lot.

In Bulungula, community members are employed to lead different activities for tourists. I went canoeing up a river, took a walk through a forest with the community herbalist who pointed out different plants they use for medicine, and spent a day with the woman doing traditional women’s work (titled “Women Empowerment”). They painted our faces with some type of clay that acts like a natural sunscreen and then decorated our faces with red paint. We then went to the nearby spring to fetch water. All of the Americans had small buckets (about ½ gallon size or smaller) and all of the Xhosa women had 5 gallon buckets. All I have to say is that it takes some serious neck muscles to carry a 5 gallon bucket on your head up and down steep hill without the use of your hands! The line of 13 Americans struggling to balance our buckets of water on our heads was quite a funny show for the villagers to watch! (For the record, I never dropped mine) We then went to the forest to collect firewood, which we bundled and carried back on our heads. All of this activity was followed by beans and millie (corn) for lunch…very satisfying. During our stay in the village, we had a sunrise pancake breakfast on the beach. It was absolutely beautiful watching the sunrise over the ocean and having wonderful homemade pancakes to eat! The beaches have no people on them and are full of shells that are washed up daily as the tide comes in and out. I can say that I have never felt so relaxed in my life.

The countdown has begun for returning home. This next week I will be doing a home stay in a black township in Cape Town. This should be an interesting, yet eye opening experience. After that I have two weeks left in beautiful Cape Town before I begin the long journey back to Minneapolis. When reflecting back to the beginning of my stay in Cape Town, it seems so long ago. I have learned so much, and in doing so I have realized that there is always more to learn. One thing that I have clearly learned is that humanity constantly creates walls between people groups over small differences, but in the end we have more similarities than differences. This is why many people have taken up the work of taking down these walls, because humanity does better when we are able to rely on one another. Unity within humanity is defiantly something worth fighting for. ~ Shalom