Extreme African Adventures and How to Create More Meaning in Your Life

I just got back from a week of travel through Southern Africa, and I feel re-connected, whole and inspired, and reminded of some of the stuff I value most in the idea of Agile living, so I wanted to share some of it with you. I had hoped I could post about it on the blog, while I was traveling, but we were often without an internet connection, and even when we were able to connect, the connection was too slow and poor to upload photos.

Travel: an important part of the Agile Living philosophy

One of the main reasons I love travel is because of the way it exposes me to different lifestyles and ways of being, challenges my assumptions and opens my mind to new possibilities. I’ve written before about the essence of Agile Living being about developing a curious and enquiring mind, because curiosity and enquiry opens your mind, an open mind opens your heart, and the natural extension of an open heart is open hands - hands that give and receive freely, get actively involved and make a positive, loving contribution… in spite of all the sacrifices, risks, challenges and difficulties inherent in showing up to make your contribution. For me, travel inspires this form of Agile Living and my husband, Andy, and I try to do a few trips each year that we know will epitomize the Agile Living values and really leave us changed.

Andy’s actually been on an extensive roadtrip through Southern Africa for the past month. Poor internet connectivity across Southern Africa means that I’m not able to travel and continue running my business, so I decided to join Andy for just a week of the trip.

The main purpose of this particular trip was to visit Zithulele Hospital in a rural village near Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape, to tie up the details for a building project we’re running in December. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment, but first I wanted to give you a sense of the area in a few pictures and words…

Where we went:

I flew into Johannesburg (Gauteng, just North of Bethlehem on the map below) and Andy I drove down through the Drakensberg (a mountain range that wraps around the east of Lesotho) to Zithulele Hospital, a few hours towards the coast from Mthatha, and then we headed back to Cape Town along the coast.

You can click on the map below to go to the google map of Zithulele Hospital and zoom in and out to get a better sense of the area.

The unbelievable beauty of rural South Africa

You’d be forgiven if you came to the romantic conclusion that rural South Africa is a heavenly place to live. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the almost luminous green fields and rolling mountains smack of fertility and abundance. The repeated design of the brightly colored little mud huts is incredibly pleasing to the eye as you look across the hills. The homelands look neat, orderly, unpolluted and uncluttered. The horses, mules, cows, goats and chickens roam freely and are seemingly abundant, all followed by little babies at this time of the year. The children all seem to be involved in healthy play outside in the fresh air, swimming in the sea, walking in the hills, kicking a cow bladder on a soccer field, tending to animals, fishing with sticks, and helping with farm work. And everybody waves at us as we drive by and greets us warmly when we stop.

The extreme contrast of the unbelievable hardship of rural South Africa

The outer beauty of this area paradoxically veils daily social and personal challenges that are hard for an outsider to imagine and even believe possible – especially when you’re standing looking at such extreme geographic beauty. One of the reasons why the area looks so neat and clean and you don’t see clutter is because, as the poorest district in probably the poorest province in South Africa, the people here can’t afford to buy the stuff that clutters our lives and causes pollution. They own little more than the clothes on their back, a couple of implements for farming and cooking, and a few animals. 77% of the people living in these villages are unemployed and living off government grants that amount to less than R800 (about $100 or £64) each month, and on average they’re feeding a family of at least five people off that income.

The hangover of the apartheid legacy of migrant labor means that the rural areas are still mostly women and children with the young men having been sent to the urban areas to try to earn a living for their families, creating major stress on marital and father-child relationships, and contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS statistics for the area vary between 12% and 30% and literacy levels are about 40%.

The huts might seem cute, but stop and take in the fact that none of these homes have running water, electricity or sanitation and most of them are many kilometers away from water sources. Some people have an outside long-drop toilet, but many people use the bushes for their toileting. All cooking is done over a fire, which means there’s a constant need to collect wood for their fires. Water has to be collected from the nearest river, which can be a few hour’s walk away – one of the reasons why the tiny women here will amaze you by carrying 25-liter buckets of water on their heads for kilometers across hills and up and down valleys. Unfortunately, in spite of the trouble it takes to collect water, a lot of the water isn’t safe for drinking, and cholera and other waterborne diseases are a big cause of illness and death in the area.

Zithulele Hospital, hub of the community

For a community like this with so many challenges to meeting their basic physical needs, illness is rife and the local hospital becomes an important hub for crisis-management and social development within the community. In fact, even for healthy members of the community, the hospital is important because it’s one of the rare employment opportunities in the area. People are clamoring to volunteer at the hospital because they’ve realized that, when employment opportunities open up at the hospital, the new recruits tend to be selected from the current group of volunteers.

Ben and Tarryn, two doctors who manage Zithulele hospital, are good friends of ours and they shared a bit about the challenges of working at Zithulele Hospital in a video interview with Andy. The parts of the video where they’re trying to explain the realities of the challenges they’re up against, while being climbed over by their own little children epitomizes for me the kind of epic heroes these doctors are – juggling their own family responsibilities while meeting the seemingly infinite community needs.

There’s no ambulance service at Zithulele hospital, and people have to travel from up to 100km away. Pregnant women either have their babies at home unassisted, or start walking to the hospital a few weeks before their baby is due to be born. Zithulele hospital has no ICU, and no fancy machines like MRIs. Some days the x-ray machines don’t even work. People regularly die of things that could easily be cured, either because they couldn’t get to the hospital, they prefer to use the services of a local Sangoma (the treatments of which often make them even more sick), or because the hospital doesn’t have the specialized resources and equipment to assist them. About 80% of the 150 inpatients at Zithulele Hospital are HIV positive.

Supporting the work at Zithulele Hospital

The main reason for our trip to the Zithulele Hospital was so that we could tie down the details for a building project we’re running at the Hospital at the end of the year. One of the greatest needs in the area is for more professional assistance, to provide a service at the hospital and to design and set up appropriate interventions and community development programs. It’s hard to attract professionals to the area, because it’s so remote and the challenges are so great, and it’s hoped that having suitable accommodation on offer would help to attract good doctors and other community development professionals to choose to work at Zithulele Hospital and in so doing, help to develop the services at the hospital and and the community at large.

So on 28 December we’ll be heading a team of volunteers and together, over two weeks (under the guidance of an experienced local builder!) we’ll be renovating an old hospital clinic building to create accommodation for four medical and community development professionals to come and live and work at Zithulele Hospital. Here’s what the building we’ll be renovating currently looks like:

I know, it’s a drop in the ocean but, much like so many other big goals in life, if we wait until we have enough money, human resources, time, and the perfect idea to solve these problems on a bigger scale, we’ll never do anything. So Andy, me, Jamie Smart and the rest of our team of volunteers are doing a little bit that we can do right now, in the knowledge that our small bit could have exponential benefits just by making it possible for people with more relevant knowledge and skills to go and live and work at Zithulele. And I’ll confess that Andy and I have a secret hope that the volunteers coming over from the UK and USA to join our project will fall hopelessly in love with South Africa and be inspired to find other ways to make their contribution using whatever networks and professional skills they can wield when they return home.

Living a meaningful life and making your contribution

There are so many ways you can get involved in making your positive contribution in the world. It doesn’t matter where and how you choose to do it, what matters is that you show up and make whatever contribution you can.

And it’s not just because other people need your help. The weird paradox is that you and I need to be a part of something meaningful, for the sake of our own happiness. Dan Pink put it so well in his book, “A Whole New Mind” where he highlights the challenges and opportunities of living and thriving in our abundant developed world in this era. He said, “We have the means, but we lack the meaning.” We have the financial resources to buy just about anything we want or need, but you can’t just buy a meaningful life – you have to create a meaningful life. And getting involved in improving the quality of other people’s lives must be the most significant and beautiful way you can create more meaning in your own life.

If you’d like to get involved with this project, I’d love that – there’s still a lot of room for your contribution here. Our team will be covering all the costs of the renovation (as well as our own costs of getting there and being there while we build) from our personal income and savings and through fund-raising efforts. Andy and I have already set aside £2000 (about $3300) from our personal income, to contribute towards this project, and that’s where you have the opportunity to get involved and make your contribution. I’d love to see you guys match our £2000 (about $3300) contribution. It would take 20 people contributing £100 (about $166) each or 50 people contributing £40 (about $66) each, or 100 people contributing just £20 (about $33) each, for us to reach this target. Totally achievable, I think. I hope you’ll join us.

The easiest way to contribute financially is through this donation button below. This donation button is set up to collect your donations in my Paypal business account and I’ll forward the funds to the hospital from there.

To donate, you’ll be taken to login into your paypal account and then you need to select “send money” and enter my Paypal account: cath@mineyourresources.com. Then enter the amount you wish to donate and click send. That should do the trick…

UK taxpayers can get tax relief and an additional 25% in contributions from the UK Government

If you’re a UK taxpayer and you’d like to receive a tax certificate for your donation and ensure that the charity receives an additional 25% of the value of your donation from the UK government, then you can send your donation directly to the Jabulani Rural Health Foundation which is a registered charity that the doctors at Zithulele have set up in the UK. Full details about how to do that are in this document and the reference you should use is “igiveada.mn.”

Join our team, come out here and risk falling in love with South Africa

If you’d love to come over and experience some of South Africa for yourself, and get your hands dirty and your muscles stiff and sore, sweating it out building in the sun by joining our volunteer building team, there’s still space for 2 or 3 more volunteers before we’re full – check out the project website or drop me an email and I’ll be happy to give you more information about joining our team and getting out here to build. The trip won’t be only hard work – it’ll include fun and adventurous experiences like a New Year celebration barbecue, staying overnight with local community members in their huts, tubing down the river, a day at the beach, a hike in the local hills and a “cultural experience” event in the village.

Also, if you’re a health professional or have skills and experience in other areas of education or community development and you’re interested to offer your services for short or longer-term time-frames, then Ben and Tarryn and their team at Zithulele would love to hear from you and I’ll be thrilled to put you in touch. Ben and Tarryn and the other young doctors at Zithulele are an outpost of crazily-idealistic, dedicated and smart heroes and sheroes with endless energy and passion – an absolute dream-team to be a part of if you want an experience of working with awesome people to make the world a better place. Drop me an email if you’d like me to put you in touch.