How a small South African backpackers is making a big community-based difference

The Hogs­back region in the East­ern Cape of South Africa attracts vis­it­ors to its indi­gen­ous forests, lush moun­tain­ous land­scape, and breath­tak­ing hikes. Lieve Claessen and part­ner Elli­ot Son­jani oper­ate Elundini Back­pack­ers in a rur­al com­munity at the edge of Hogs­back. In this won­der-filled “Good Tour­ism” Insight, Lieve shares some of the ongo­ing chal­lenges facing Elundini and its host community.

For thou­sands of years the Xhosa people have lived har­mo­ni­ously with each oth­er and with nature. Their tra­di­tion­al life­style is strongly sus­tain­able and even today they still live with a heart­felt con­nec­tion to tra­di­tion­al ways.

Since 2009, my Xhosa hus­band Elli­ot Son­jani and I have been oper­at­ing back­pack­ers accom­mod­a­tion in the rur­al and agri­cul­ture-depend­ent Elundini area. Our respons­ible tour­ism object­ives for Elundini Back­pack­ers include empower­ing our host com­munity and ensur­ing that the bene­fits of the tour­ism we attract reach our neigh­bours. To accom­plish this we have devised schemes designed both to give back to the com­munity and provide guests with authen­t­ic experiences. 

Our achievements so far …

All the exper­i­ences avail­able to vis­it­ors are organ­ised by people from the Elundini com­munity through their 100% self-owned busi­nesses. The activ­it­ies include learn­ing how to bake deli­cious Xhosa bread in the home of a loc­al fam­ily, tour­ing the vil­lage with a loc­al guide, tack­ling the tongue-twist­ing isiX­hosa lan­guage, enjoy­ing a tra­di­tion­al meal in the vil­lage, or simply imbib­ing an end-of-day drink at the loc­al she­been (pub) in the com­pany of locals.

In addi­tion to send­ing our guests to exper­i­ence the com­munity-based activ­it­ies avail­able to them, we are heav­ily involved in pro­jects that are designed to help the com­munity spe­cific­ally. These include the com­munity gar­dens, child day­care centre, as well as pro­jects for san­it­a­tion, recyc­ling, and water con­ser­va­tion. We have most recently opened an aged care and dis­ab­il­ity centre where pen­sion­ers can come togeth­er dur­ing the day for com­pan­ion­ship, a warm meal, and entertainment. 

For any pro­ject to become suc­cess­ful one has to have suf­fi­cient sup­port. To accom­plish all we have so far, we and mem­bers of the com­munity estab­lished a not-for-profit organ­isa­tion called LEO (Learn to Earn to Own). I would like to give a spe­cial shout out and thanks to Kapel van de Lus­thoven (my par­ents’ church in Bel­gi­um), Amava VZW (a Bel­gian volun­teer agency), Echap­pee Aus­trale (a French travel agency), and our volun­teers for their unwaver­ing sup­port of LEO. 

“Con­scious Trav­el­ling is mind­ful­ness of the world and the people we encounter upon our travels”. 

… and the challenges we face

In rur­al com­munit­ies one is bound to be faced with chal­lenges. There are some ongo­ing chal­lenges we face at Elundini:

• Cli­mate change has had a huge impact on loc­al agri­cul­ture. Our region has suffered from a severe drought since 2015. The tra­di­tion­al agri­cul­tur­al cycle has been dis­rup­ted and our sub­sist­ence farm­ers can’t cope. People from our com­munity are really strug­gling to make ends meet. Poverty is increas­ing. We must make our people more resi­li­ent through edu­ca­tion and awareness.
• Long term pro­jects, like our bee-keep­ing ini­ti­at­ive for example, where you can only gen­er­ate money after months or years, don’t work if people don’t have the time and energy to focus on the medi­um or long term. These pro­jects can suf­fer when people’s focus is on mak­ing ends meet until the end of the month when they receive their social grant or mea­ger salary from an inform­al industry.
• West­ern men­tal­it­ies don’t work in our vil­lage. For example on a Thursday before a funer­al no man will show up at a job as they all have to dig a grave for the deceased. It really can take a long time before a West­ern­er can learn the cul­ture. Then on top of that there are the com­munity dynam­ics and ‘vil­lage polit­ics’. Keep­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nels open is very import­ant but not always easy. 
• An ongo­ing chal­lenge for com­munity-based tour­ism is the fine line between tour­ism that has a pos­it­ive impact and tour­ism that des­troys. We must avoid depend­en­cies. Yet we must also activ­ate com­munity mem­bers able to take advant­age of tour­is­m’s poten­tial benefits.

The voluntourism challenge

A chal­lenge I’d like to focus on a little is volun­teer tour­ism. A lot has been writ­ten about volun­teer pro­grams in Africa: Do they actu­ally bene­fit a com­munity or not? They def­in­itely can bene­fit com­munit­ies, but we have also seen mal­prac­tices first hand. 

Volun­teer­ing as a first work exper­i­ence for young inter­na­tion­al trav­el­lers, or an inter-cul­tur­al exchange exper­i­ence, can be mutu­ally bene­fi­cial for the indi­vidu­al and the com­munity. How­ever, it is really very import­ant for pro­spect­ive volun­teers to do prop­er research to ensure that the pro­grams they apply for suit their skills, interests, and exper­i­en­tial object­ives. If so, then the com­munity will also more likely benefit. 

Every year at Elundini we re-eval­u­ate our ‘volun­teer pro­gram’ to see wheth­er or not it has a pos­it­ive impact. Some of the volun­teer exper­i­ences avail­able at Elundini include teach­ing in the pub­lic schools and kinder­gartens, provid­ing assist­ance to income-gen­er­at­ing pro­jects, and imple­ment­ing envir­on­ment­al con­ser­va­tion pro­jects, among oth­ers. We try to ensure that the volun­teer exper­i­ence is appro­pri­ate to the individual’s skills as well as the needs of the community. 

A min­im­um of 15% of the volun­teers’ fin­an­cial con­tri­bu­tions to our not-for-profit LEO are dir­ectly donated to the pro­jects they work on. In the begin­ning I was against volun­teers pay­ing any­thing. But then I real­ised that if they pay they would be more inves­ted in what they were about to embark upon, we would have an extra source of income for LEO, and we could employ people to cook for the volun­teers as well as appoint a volun­teer coordin­at­or. So it is a win-win situ­ation. The volun­teers have a great exper­i­ence, jobs are cre­ated, and com­munity pro­jects bene­fit from new skills and addi­tion­al resources.

Our biggest chal­lenge with volun­teer­ing is that because we are care­ful about who we select, we can­’t rely on a con­stant sup­ply of volun­teers with the skills and expect­a­tions that fit loc­al needs. And it is hard for a small, grass roots organ­isa­tion to get noticed among the big volun­teer organ­isa­tions. They may have huge mar­ket­ing funds to rank first on Google, but they are not always the most ethical. 

It’s all worth it 

Des­pite the many chal­lenges, the impact our work has been able to gen­er­ate so far is remark­able. If you were to vis­it here and inter­act with the loc­als, I am cer­tain that they will tell you their stor­ies and the pos­it­ive impacts our Elundini Back­pack­ers has had in their lives. 

Fea­tured image: Elundini Back­pack­ers homestead. Image sup­plied by author.

About the author

Ori­gin­ally from Bel­gi­um, Lieve Claessen first vis­ited South Africa in 1999 with a volun­teer pro­ject and then worked as an occu­pa­tion­al ther­ap­ist in dif­fer­ent town­ships around Pletten­berg Bay. There she met her future hus­band, Elli­ot Son­jani, who hails from the Hogs­back region but was study­ing in Pletten­berg Bay at the time. In 2001 the couple moved to Bel­gi­um where they wel­comed the arrival of their two chil­dren, Lucas and Elena. After years of dream­ing and plan­ning, the young fam­ily moved back to South Africa in 2009 to found Elundini Back­pack­ers. It took them 18 months to turn an open piece of land into a space they can call home and where back­pack­ers can feel at home.