Living and farming in Bolotwa (Eastern District, South Africa), a backto basics experience

Wednesday 5 March 2008 – Introduction to household
After a fruitful PARASOL-meeting from Monday to Wednesday, we leave the Trennery’s Hotel short after noon. My guide, Nkomo, a animal health advisor from the National Wool Grower’s association drives me to the Bolotwa-farm. I ‘m introduced to Rorwana, the farmer with whom I will live for the next couple of days, we get in the car again, load in today’s collected milk and drive from the farm to the village Bolotwa (Eastern Cape), an estimated 10 km further away, with an estimated population of 300 people.
As typical for most households in the village, Rorwana lives in a “rondawel” a round hut with a roof of reed. Next to the rondawel, he has a squared house. However, this squared house is only used for sleeping and washing. There are a lot of children around when I arrive, but they disappear shortly after I have given them a lollipop. Only 2 children stay, Joanella and Lisa, 2 of the grandchildren that are raised here since the parents are studying or working in Cape Town. Specially for me as the guest, a chicken is slaughtered, which is served with corn meal and sour milk (this was new to me and was not really the best thing I had already eaten in my life). At 8 p.m. it becomes dark and since there is no electricity, time to get washed and go to sleep, after having looked at the wonderful star-spangled sky.

My guest family Rorwana and Nobuneu

Thursday 6 March – A day in a farmer’s live
Rorwana’s wife gets up at 5 a.m. to wash, prepare the breakfast and prepare the children to go to school (7a.m.). At 6.30 a.m., I am waked-up, and at 8 a.m. I ‘m served breakfast (chicken!, potatoes and carrots, certainly not what they eat usually as a breakfast!). The bus to the farm is late today and only at 9.15 we leave in an overcrowded bus with laughing, friendly, joyful, trumpeting people. The bus will take us to the farm. From my understanding this farm has been purchased by the government for the people of Bolotwa, allowing them to make a living. The animals seem to belong to different people, but they are managed together by some young boys.
On arrival at the farm, I am being shown a recently calved cow with retained placenta and a sick sheep. They are treated with oxytetracyclines (together with niclosamide, the only drug available on the farm) and were better the next day. Next, I am being demonstrated how the cows are milked. There are 39 cows, being milked by 4-5 young men. Cows and calves are separated first. Next the cows are brought into the milking area and the calve is released. While letting the calve suckle for 1 minute, the hind legs of the cows are bound together. Next, the calve is chased away and the cow is milked by hand. Cows are milked once a day in the morning with an average production of an estimated 5 liters. During milking they are fed with hay and grains that is bought. There is no electricity on the farm, so the milk can’t be refrigerated. However after the milking, it is poured through a sieve to remove pieces of dirt and flies and stored in plastic vials in the shadow. Each day some of the milk is divided to people working on the farm and about 80 liter is brought home on the bus or via a jeep to Rorwana’s home. After the milking Rorwana takes me for a walk through the fields, showing the maize and potato fields. Around noon we eat a cooked corncob with salt that the farm people are selling on the street and I meet Kgomotso, a last-year student Animal Health Production, who will also stay at Rorwana’s home for the next 2 days. Back at the farm, the sister of guest wife and one of the sons working in a village nearby come to visit us. We are sitting outside and the many people of the village pass by to buy milk (3 rand per liter) and to make a talk. In the evening, we eat chicken (!) with rice.

On the way to the farm

Milking the cows

Friday 7 March – FAMACHA
Today we drive again by bus to the farm. The cows are getting milked again and afterwards we are waiting for Kgomotso the animal health advisor who will come to inspect the sheep. The sheep are collected and are evaluated on five checkpoints: bottle-jaw, FAMACHA (anaemia as judged by looking at ocular mucosae), body condition score (palpation of sacral area), dag score (dirtiness of hindquarters) and a faecal sample.
The sheep are divided in different groups: one group is not evaluated, the red group is evaluated on the five check-points and treated with moxidectin if the famacha has a score 3 or higher, the green group is also evaluated and treated with another drug based on the famacha-criterion and finally the white group serves as a control group and is evaluated on the check-points but not treated. Although I am too unexperienced to judge the measurements, my first impression of the scoring was that it often happened too quick (body condition score without proper palpation, famacha without using the card), leading to inaccurate evaluations. After doing this, Nkomo drives us back to Bolotwa, where I decide to take a walk through the village, but I am promptly accosted by some people who ask where I am going (“You cannot just take a walk without going somewhere with a purpose”) and advice me to go back to the house where I stay. Back at the Rorwana’s house, Kgomotso tries to organize our way back for tomorrow to the airport.

Separating the Sheep

Doing FAMACHA

Saturday 8 March – Going to East London
Rorwana has organized us a taxi (someone of the village who owns a car) that brought at 8 a.m. to the farm. There we are picked up by Jan van Rensburg and Laura, with who we exchange our experiences while driving back to East London.

Finally,
Overall, this was a wonderful experience, allowing me to learn a bit on how Xhosa people in the communities live, communicate and make an income from their animals. Some special things will stay me by for a long time:

• The friendliness of the people
• The enormous respect for elder people. Children behave very polite in the
  presence of visitors and adults.
• I began to understand for the first time the word “community” by seeing
  how all people depend on each other and do so much things in common.
• A women suffering from arthritis which did not stop her from carrying 50
  liter-buckets on the head.
• Everybody has a cell-phone.

Johannes

Community visit -  Bolotwa JC (PDF, 535 kB)

All Pictures: © Johannes Charlier