In 2018 I spent 3 months in the township of Melkhoutfontein, South Africa. I did an internship with Dreamcatcher Foundation South Africa, a pioneer in sustainable tourism. Get to know more about my life in a township as the only white girl. How can you visit the community and what did I do there? Find out how it changed my life.
If you prefer to listen to this blogpost instead, here it is:
Why Dreamcatcher Foundation?
I did this internship for my tourism studies. Sustainability was always a topic close to my heart and also tourism. So the combination sustainable tourism always interested me. I fell in love with South Africa while watching YouTube videos and it was on top of my bucket list. I knew that for my internship I wanted to go there. If you want to see all you can do in South Africa with Dreamcatcher Foundation, make sure you read or watch my Cape Town Travel Guide!
Dreamcatcher Foundation is a pioneer in sustainable tourism and local community-based tourism by using inclusivity, which means including all the local people into tourism. They are working towards all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The organization is a best practice when it comes to sustainable tourism. So my mind was made up pretty quickly.
Dreamcatcher’s work is recognized worldwide. They have received many awards. The last one was from the African Tourism Leadership Forum and it’s not just inside of Africa that the organization is recognized. They get a lot of international awards as well. On top of that, it is founded by an amazing, powerful woman. She started it post-Apartheid to really make Mandela’s dream work.
The influence it had on me
My great experience with Dreamcatcher Foundation led me to doing another bachelor’s in International Collaboration North South, which is basically development aid. My internship of six months was in Peru and it was also focused on sustainable tourism. I plan to travel all over the world and I will be searching for more sustainable community-based tourism companies and share them with you.
Hopefully you will also see the benefits of this community-based, inclusive tourism and maybe we can make a change that way. Whilst travelling I will be working on a database of all these community-based tourism companies with Dreamcatcher Foundation and other tourist companies all over the world. I’m also putting up a web shop and working on the marketing strategy for a Dreamcatcher foundation.
Homestay with Kamamma
Dreamcatcher Foundation offers local Homestays on the traditional touristic routes, like Soweto in Johannesburg and near Cape Town as well. It was an amazing experience, being this close to the people. I stayed in Melkhoutfontein for the majority of my three months in South Africa. It’s a 4-hour drive from Cape Town along the Garden Road in Eastern Direction. A couple of kilometers away is Stilbaai, which is a city by the ocean.
I stayed with Kamamma Gerti, her daughter Gertwin, her grandson Leighton, her son, her husband and her other daughter, Lucretia. Lucretia is a girl with a disability, unfortunately. She’s usually in her wheelchair and she can’t talk, but she can definitely laugh out loud when something funny happens. She can be really grumpy if something annoying happens. It’s so inspiring to see how they really incorporate her and her needs into the family and into day to day life. Dreamcatcher Foundation also takes care of people in the community that have special needs.
I even made chocolate mousse with the leftover Belgian chocolate that I had with me, and she loved it so much. She was eating it off her trousers, that’s how much she liked it.
After work
The family also had a dog named Tiger and on the weekends he was let loose. He was so excited to be free that he would actually jump over the bottom part of the back door, rush through the living room and back out the front door.
Imagine sitting at the breakfast table and a dog flies through a room. It’s absolutely crazy. There was a beautiful bathroom, a shower, a toilet, anything you needed, a beautiful bedroom that had a double bed, a lot of closet room and also a great view onto the streets where a lot of the hustle and bustle of daily life happened.
Every single evening after dinner we would watch a Bollywood soap. These are so ridiculous, but that’s what makes them fun to watch. I would spend some quality time with the family and at about 10pm it was time to go to bed. There was no Wi-Fi, so you couldn’t keep busy otherwise. I got 10 hours of sleep every single night, it was awesome!
The weekends
The weekend was my favorite part of the week. We would climb onto the back of the bakkie and drive to the supermarket along the beautiful river. This bakkie (which is a pickup truck) was really old. Every single morning they had to try, and try, and try for about ten minutes to get it going. We would go in and watch the rugby play. A traditional braai (BBQ) was on the menu. Coming back from the food shop or a day at the beach, we would have an ice cream in the back of the bakkie. The simple things in life matter so much there.
On the weekends from time to time i would go out. There was one cafe in the town that most of the people would go to on the weekends. This was by far one of the strangest experiences. The bar is like a cell with rails along it and the lights are on. It’s so strange! Unfortunately, the rails are there because there’s a lot of alcoholism in South Africa in general. Obviously, being the only white girl in the community, lots of people asked me if it was safe. I never, not even one moment, felt unsafe there.
Volunteering
Apart from the family, I had a lot of amazing colleagues at Dreamcatcher Foundation. They all lived in the community. We went to the office every single day, on trips, on team building activities. I couldn’t have wished for better colleagues.
My job as an intern was to make as many pictures as possible of the volunteers who were working on projects, but also just the community and things that we did in the office. I then put them onto social media. We met a South African celebrity, Karin Hougaard, and ended up in the paper. I also helped organize a couple of events and wrote articles to promote them. So that was mainly what I was doing day to day. Making travel itineraries and invoices was also a big part of my job.
Apart from the colleagues, a lot of other volunteers stayed in the community from time to time. There are multiple things that you can do as a volunteer. For example, you can give football courses or paint the houses.
PaintUp with Kamamma
If you are an amazing artist, maybe you want to look into this. There are a couple of artists that come once a year, or once every two years, and they paint murals onto the houses. It is a huge privilege if your house is chosen for this, because it really makes your house stand out. People start to paint their own houses now and they become so proud of their community.
You can also take part in a guided tour along the murals with Dreamcatcher Foundation. The murals all tell a story from the history of the whole community. They also tell the story of when their ancestors lived by the ocean. What did they do with the fish traps and in the caves?
One of the events that I helped organize was an exhibition with art that was made of reused waste. They use the waste that they find in the landfill, too close by to the community, and reuse it. They give it a new purpose and turn the waste into beautiful things.
Waste land – Graced land
I’m actually working on a web shop so that they can sell these beautiful products and you can buy them and support the community and Dreamcatcher Foundation. For a long time the waste on the landfill would be burnt. The waste mainly comes from the nearby town of Stilbaai. When the wind comes from the wrong direction, the smoke is blown into the community. This is really bad for the health of the people living there. Due to the efforts that Dreamcatcher has made, they now have a waste working group and they have stopped burning all the waste.
The only way to really create change, is to give them an alternative.
In this case it is the reuse and the recycling of the waste. One of the Kamammas even made her homestay out of recycled materials, it is incredible!
The garden of the office has a lot of indigenous flowers. There were so many March Lilies. Dreamcatcher Foundation is helping these indigenous species by cutting down Acacia Cyclops, which is a kind of tree that is not indigenous to the region. It’s taking over the territory of the local plants called Fijnbos. The Acacia Cyclops that is cut down, is used in products that will be sold in the shop. Keep an eye out for that!
Animals ♥
Every morning at 7.30am when i stayed at the office, the hummingbird would come and wake me up, by knocking on my window. The animals were one of the reasons I really loved living in Melkhoutfontein. Obviously, it’s an African country, so you can see a lot of special animals, like the hummingbird. Also a lot of crabs made their way into the office if the door was open, since we were so close to the ocean.
We also found a teeny tiny tortoise. I saw an owl once driving through the town at night. There was an office dog called Slimpie. This dog would go with the painters. He would inspect if they were doing everything right and would come to the office every single day and lay in front of the door to scare away the crabs. It was really my best mate.
KickUp with Kamamma
Dreamcatcher also has a lot of projects that are linked to health, for example the KickUp with Kamamma. They go to the beach with lots of kids to do stretching and to get moving.
They also have a lot of first aid projects. Especially, now, they make sure that everyone is safe, that they have the means to protect themselves. A lot of people in the community get first aid courses, because the access to medical care is very bad.
Food – CookUp with Kamamma
They also have the CookUp with Kamamma project. That personally is my favorite Dreamcatcher Foundation project, because I don’t think there’s a lot in this world that I love more than food. In a CookUp with Kamamma you learn how to cook traditional local food.
For example, the potjie is a pot that they put on the braai, the barbecue, and it kind of slow cooks. It’s a kind of stew and it’s so delicious. I definitely didn’t lose any weight while living there at the host family. They also had some fresh fish delivered from time to time because Gerti’s brother was a fisherman. Then she made the most delicious, freshest fish and chips.
They have amazing rooister koek, which is a kind of small bread. Vet koek is a bit more fatty. Pancakes that are made of pumpkins and sweet potato that grow in their beautiful garden of La Bloemen.
I’ll be back ♥
What I miss most of the whole experience is the people: the family, my sister Gertwin, the amazing colleagues at Dreamcatcher Foundation like Katrina and her granddaughter. Most of all my mentor Anthea, the founder of Dreamcatcher Foundation. She is the most amazing woman.
I would recommend you go visit the community yourself and meet these amazing people. When I spent months in Mexico and Peru, eventually, when it was time to go home I was ready. With South Africa that was not the case! I really wanted to stay longer and I will be going back, that’s for sure!