Building the Lodge

The lodge is situated on a hilltop, with a stunning view onto the sea and two beautiful beaches on either side. The building site is about 10 minutes' walk outside the boundary of the village. We are building with natural materials, fully in Transkei style, which means mud bricks and thached roofs. The villagers help with building: women come to make bricks, boys collect stones for foundations and help digging the dam, men come to lay foundations and build walls etc. The bricks and thatching are being bought from the village.

During the building process the design of the kitchen building and the roof has changed, and in the end we had to choose tin for the roof instead of thatching. The roof structure wasn't strong enough to support the weight of all that thatching. So we just thatched the inside of the roof, to make it look nice, and then put roof sheets on top of that. The front room has got a clay floor and the walls are being built with stones that the kids collected in the fields. The walls of the boma have also been re-done with sticks instead of thatching (the wind eventually took all the thatching down). We learn as we go!

Around the lodge, we have built a thatched boma area to sit in and make a fire, some vegetable gardens, a big dam and some smaller dams, a compost toilet, a bush shower ... The water we use comes from a nearby spring, and in summer we collect rain water.

To find out what we are building at the moment, visit our Mpame Blog!

Compost Toilet There are several options to build an effective and simple toilet. The most common one would be a longdrop, but we found it impractical for a lodge: too much maintainance, too much smell. So we decided to do a compost toilet that seperates concrete waste from liquid, and has a flush system to stop the smell. Read how it's done ...	Bush Shower We have built a little shower with thatched walls that is gravity fed through a pipe from the upper dam. To get warm water, we either use a solar heater or a boiler (an antique coffee urn, works wonderfully!). The water from the shower will be recycled through a soakaway bed. Read more ...
Drinking Water All the water we use - for drinking, washing, building, gardens - comes from a nearby spring. It is a little bit lower than the hilltop, so we had to build a little dam lower down, gravity feed it through 300m pipe from the spring, and then pump the water up to the lodge. But first, we had to dig out and fence in the spring ... see the mess!	Energy So far, we have a little generater that runs on petrol and powers the water pump, our laptop and a few lights at the lodge. But we intend to strongly focus on alternative energy and get a wind turbine up, and solar panels ... coming soon.