Strolling with ‘nomakhayas’: How the Bulungula Incubator is remodeling in Wild Coast communities


  • The Bulungula Incubator’s group of public fitness staff, referred to as nomakhayas, advance from area to deal with in Nqileni and condition villages.
  • An cutting edge fitness programme is flourishing and creating a too much within the lives of native citizens.
  • Sue Segar spent date with the venture, strolling with nomakhayas and taking a ferry travel around the Xhora River.

In a miniature thatched hut, midway up a hill within the Wild Coast village of Nqileni, a tender public fitness colleague is helping a frail, aged guy onto a transportable scale. He suffered a stroke not too long ago and has epilepsy, she explains, so it’s noteceable to test on him continuously and assure he’s taking his fix as prescribed.

Time she assesses him, a 2d fitness colleague speaks to the person’s spouse, who’s protecting a child. She pulls a plastic bag, containing the public’s sanatorium playing cards, from underneath a bed.

Some other fitness colleague unpacks a cluster of toys from a backpack and invitations the newborn’s younger aunt to attach her on a mat at the flooring with the newborn.

As they play games, the fitness colleague observes the newborn to peer how she’s growing, and the way she pertains to her grownup kinfolk. Nearest, they weigh the newborn, measure her peak and take a look at that her immunisations are as much as life.

There’s an wind of familiarity and consider as we take a seat within the one-roomed dwelling the fitness staff talk over with continuously.

They performed ante-natal and post-natal visits to the newborn’s mom and monitored her psychological wellness right through and nearest her being pregnant; they presented breastfeeding assistance and monitored the newborn’s enlargement from delivery.

We’ve walked a excellent 20 mins to this home, between rolling, grass-covered hills scattered with neat, colourful huts, pace a miniature flock of sheep and throughout a tide.

Within the distance is the ocean. From one standpoint it’s paradise right here – paradise minus jobs and unadorned facilities corresponding to roads.

I’m accompanying the public fitness staff, referred to as nomakhayas, on their home-based lend a hand rounds for the Bulungula Incubator.

The non-profit organisation, arrange within the mid-2000s, works to form self-reliance on this rural public which has an unemployment price of round 90 %.

Nomakhayas – strolling from area to deal with

Each month, Bulungula’s group of 20 nomakhayas advance from area to deal with in Nqileni and the 3 condition villages – Mgojweni, Folokhwe and Tshezi – which include the Xhora Mouth administrative section.

The nomakhayas lift immense backpacks which, they inform me, comprise blood power and blood sugar machines, a scale, tape measures and the mid-upper arm circumference tape old to spot malnutrition, in addition to being pregnant assessments and condoms.

“Each nomakhaya goes out from 08:00 to 17:00 every weekday to assigned homes,” says home-based care programme manager Bongezwa Maleyile.

She explains:

We support people with chronic illnesses and do the screening at their homes. We check that they’re adhering to medication. If we pick up that someone is unwell, we refer them to the Bulungula Health Point.

The nomakhayas have also been trained to help people with disabilities to overcome some of the barriers they face in such a remote community and have a “toolkit” to create awareness in the community about disabilities.

READ | Bulungula Incubator: Three steps to help rural communities live longer

The nomakhayas also carry toys, used for Bulungula’s early childhood development programme. Earlier in the day, I joined the nomakhayas at a play group in the village, where mothers of children under three bring them twice a week for two hours.

The children stack blocks and fit shapes together, sing songs, and engage with their peers.

While the children play, the health workers talk to the mothers, to check whether they have any problems, discuss health issues and keep tabs on the children’s development.

“Those play games teams support form the connection between mom and kid. Once they’re used, we would like them in an effort to inform their moms what they’re going via,” says Maleyile.

“Those village kids had been taking part in in combination since they have been slight, like brothers and sisters.”

A hub for numerous outreach programmes

The Bulungula Incubator’s main office is located next to a preschool – one of five managed by Bulungula. The bustling building is the hub of a number of the incubator’s local upliftment projects.

Through a “preconception to occupation” approach, they run education and health and nutrition programmes, as well as promoting sustainable livelihoods.

Amidst the buzz of adult activity running the hub, the sounds of children’s voices ring from the various rondavels housing the preschool classrooms; the smell of cooking comes from the kitchen in the main precinct – Bulungula provides daily nutritious hot meals, including vegetables grown in their own gardens, to all children and staff.

The children receive regular growth monitoring as well as deworming and vitamin A supplements.

Besides the health outreach, the early childhood development programmes and the five preschools, they manage a primary school maths programme, while Bulungula College – with learners from more than 20 villages – is the area’s first high school to offer matric as well as vocational education.

They also run a radio station which broadcasts to more than 100 villages.

Bulungula Health Point

A few minute’s walk away from the main office is the Bulungula Health Point, a Central Chronic Medicines Dispensing and Distribution pick-up point that was set up in 2021. Between 30 and 60 clients are seen at the health point per day.

Residents can access medical care, collect their HIV treatment or be tested for the virus and have other screenings.

It is staffed by two professional nurses and a mental health counsellor who are paid by the Bulungula Incubator with a contribution from the department of health.

The nearest government clinic, Nkanya, is at least a two-hour walk from Nqileni and includes a ferry trip across the Xhora River, which can’t be crossed in heavy rain.

Stories abound about the struggles patients faced before the Bulungula Health Point was set up. Maleyile, who grew up in Nqileni, recalls how, in 2021, pregnant, she woke up feeling unwell and went straight there.

They immediately picked up foetal distress and I was referred to Madwaleni Hospital, where I had an emergency C-section. If I’d walked to Nkanya, I would have lost my baby.

She continues: “Ahead of we had the fitness level, it used to be now not unusual to peer closely pregnant girls strolling to Nkanya Health facility. On occasion folk would push them in wheelbarrows. It would pluck them a month to get there and again.

READ | At an advantage driving in wheelbarrow to clinic than looking forward to ambulance

“A grandmother, who was HIV-positive, diabetic, and on hypertension meds, had to walk to the Nkanya Clinic to get her medication. It became more and more difficult for her to get there. I watched her health deteriorate as she started defaulting. It was not that she wanted to default on her medication; she just didn’t have the energy in the end.”

On the Bulungula Fitness Level, I meet the nurses in price, in addition to Stella Bili, a sessional carer who runs a cell outreach sanatorium to neighbouring villages.

She says the ability has been a gamechanger in lowering the immunisation dropouts and prime being pregnant charges that characterized the section earlier than.

Sister Bili stresses that the fitness level works “hand-in-hand” with the branch of fitness, on a dimension of fitness campaigns.

A advance to the sanatorium

The later month, accompanied by means of a information, we begin the advance to Nkanya Health facility, which, for a few years, used to be the nearest sanatorium for the native villagers in this facet of the Xhora River.

The nurses on the fitness level have requested us to pluck some blood samples throughout to the sanatorium which we supply in our backpacks. We manufacture our means indisposed a steep pathway in opposition to the river.

Information Yonwaba Olo, recollects how, when his grandfather become in poor health in 2009, he took him to the sanatorium in a wheelchair.

“He couldn’t walk … I had to carry him from the wheelchair onto the boat. The side of the river is very muddy and he was worried his clothes would get dirty in the mud. It was slippery getting into the boat. On the other side of the river, we pushed him along the paths to the clinic.”

READ | Dwelling on a worship: Navigating a secure passage to healthcare in rural SA

The ferryman is ready along side the river, sitting in a miniature rowing boat. With Olo translating, I ask him about a few of his recollections of rowing sufferers around the river.

He recollects a date when a mom and a grandmother crossed the river, with the mum sporting a in poor health child on her again.

“The baby was really struggling to breathe. I think the baby had asthma … I wondered if the baby was even alive when they got off the ferry.

“Upcoming that month, many hours nearest, they returned, with out the newborn. They left the frame in the back of. I felt very unhappy for that mom and grandmother.”

Nkanya Clinic

Nkanya Health facility. (Elliot Cousins/Highlight)

The writer in conversation with Sister Stella Bili

The editor in dialog with Sister Stella Bili. (Elliot Cousins/Highlight)

The sick often have to be transported in wheelbarr

The in poor health frequently must be transported in wheelbarrows to get scientific support. (Lightless Famous person/Highlight)

The Bulungula Fitness Level.

The Bulungula Health Point. (Elliot Cousins/Spotlight)

Once across the river, we walk in the heat through the hills, past many homesteads. After an hour and a half we reach a dirt road. We cross another stream with a small bridge over it and, a few kilometres further we reach Nkanya Clinic.

Clinic manager Keka Soldati greets us warmly and takes the blood samples. She explains that Nkanya works closely with the Bulungula Health Point. “They’ve taken a plethora load off us,” she says. “The paintings we’re doing in combination is preserve many lives.”

Where it all started

Bulungula co-founder Dave Martin describes himself as a “common McGyver” at the incubator.

Twenty-two years ago, after graduating with a Bachelor of Business Science from the University of Cape Town, Martin says he travelled on public transport through Africa to London, worked in the IT sector in the UK for three years, before travelling around Asia and South America for another two years. But all he wanted to do was return to South Africa and live in a Xhosa village.

As the head of the student-run NGO the Students’ Health and Welfare Centre’s Organisation, in his final year at UCT, he’d decided that his passion was not finance but community development.

“In my vacations, I’d bounce on a bus and head north into east and central Africa. All through the ones travels I realised my actual love, the place I felt maximum at dwelling, used to be the agricultural African village year.”

READ | This small, solar-powered clinic has greatly improved primary health care for Eastern Cape villagers

On his return from his travels, in 2002, he says he walked the beach, from Kei Mouth to Port St Johns on South Africa’s Wild Coast, looking for a place to call home and to start a community development enterprise. “I had this concept to usefulness tourism as a device for public construction within the rural boxes,” he says.

Halfway into his walk, he found a derelict building and negotiated with the community, the local government and the then Department of Land Affairs for a permit to start a tourism lodge.

“The Bulungula Hotel – a three way partnership between the public and myself – opened in 2004. I ran it for 10 years, until 2014 and upcoming I gave my percentage of the trade to the public,”says Martin.

Not long after he moved to Nqileni, Martin met his wife Rejane Woodroffe in Cape Town. She is a financial analyst and economist who is also Bulungula’s executive director.

Bulungula Lodge expands to bigger projects

The Bulungula Lodge was doing well, creating jobs and winning awards for community development, but the couple soon realised there was more work to be done in Nqileni and beyond.

Woodroffe continues the story: “In 2006, a 3rd of the small children on this village died of diarrhea. It used to be an overly vital match. We needed to do one thing, so we began elevating cash for H2O tanks.

“That same year, a local mud school, No-Ofisi Primary, collapsed, so we started raising money for a classroom.

“We realised we would have liked a non-profit entity to begin doing all this paintings. I used to be nonetheless running within the finance trade and we installed a few of our personal cash and registered a non-profit organisation. We raised about R250 000 in seed investment and grew from there.

“We went from the crisis response to the water, to the education situation and then we opened the first preschools. Then the home-based care came and as we were trying to solve the next problem, we encountered all the primary school gaps. Then there was no high school so Bulungula College came. There was no grand plan, it all just happened over time,” says Woodroffe.

Nowadays, they’ve 130 everlasting workforce contributors and 50 interns – about 180 folk – at the payroll, running at the numerous programmes on schooling, fitness, colourful villages, sustainable livelihoods and farming. “We cook almost 1 000 hot meals a day. It is quite an operation and our budget is around R20 million a year which we have to fundraise for.”

And to lift budget, it’s noteceable to turn the incubator’s affect. Bulungula has carried out a tablet-based information assortment machine which the nomakhayas additionally usefulness. The entire knowledge captured synchs with a database that is helping measure the affect in their tasks, taking into consideration {that a} unmarried person can get pleasure from a number of of the incubator’s tasks. “A lot of people are interested in learning from our person-centred data model,” says Woodroffe.

‘Our relationship with the department is excellent’

Turning to the Bulungula Fitness Level, Woodroffe says it’s been one of the crucial actual game-changers for the public. The fitness level began when someone donated a hut for them to run HIV assistance teams.

“The community loved what was happening so they built a small building using their own money and physical labour. We started running various health services and home-based care services, then eventually we hired a nurse, and added more and more services. Today it is fully renovated, has two fulltime nurses, an outreach nurse, mobile bus, it has a mental health component and it has a memorandum of understanding with the [health] department.”

“Our relationship with the department is excellent. They cover about 60-70 percent of the costs of our health programme now,” says Woodroffe.

“What we’ve achieved here would have been totally unimaginable without the help of the government. They come here and they give us free medication, even though we are not even an officially registered clinic; they offer training for our nurses and our nomakhayas and they help us wherever they can.”

Martin is adamant that the luck of the Bulungula Fitness Level would had been not possible with out the continued assistance from native fitness officers, their “can do” perspective, and the robust bond of consider that has constructed up between Bulungula, the public, and the branch.

“A lot of the officials were once nurses … I am regularly blown away by their passion to make a difference in these communities,” he says.

Protecting the federal government for now not having constructed extra clinics within the section, Martin continues: “What number of clinics will have to there be in a park like this the place it is only village nearest village nearest village, all wanting roads? The roads are a plethora problem. The problem of the previous Transkei is actual with regards to the spatial set-up. It’s now not only a tale of corrupt officers who don’t lend a hand or incompetent officers who do lend a hand however can’t do the task.

“The only way through it is to have this partnership approach where we realise there are limited resources and we’re all in it together. That’s what we’ve got going in this part of the world and what we need on a national level,” he says.

‘Issues are getting higher’

“I guess when you see progress, like we do, massively, here … it makes one believe things are getting better. Even if one looks beyond one’s small community and looks further afield in the rural areas like ours … as you drive around you see that in 2004, the closest electricity wire to us was almost 30kms away. That’s where the electricity grid ended. Now as you drive through the villages, every single village has electricity. Similarly taps, and toilets. You see better schools, much better housing.

“Even having a look at alternative metrics spherical poverty and nationwide statistics, It’s not that i am being naïve, and I do know one can see the deterioration, in particular in probably the most heavy metros like Joburg … on the identical date, the narrative that the entirety is falling aside is wrong.

“We need much more balanced reporting on what is happening in the country,” Martin says. “If one has that more balanced view, there are lots of reasons to be optimistic,” he provides.

*This article used to be first printed by means of Highlight – fitness journalism within the nation hobby. Signal as much as the Highlight publication

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