Ava's recognition that she has a lot to learn

With orientation coming to a close, I’ve finally had some downtime to reflect on what I’ve been experiencing since I got here. After two weeks, the excitement and adrenaline has gone down and the need for sleep is becoming more of a real struggle as we go about our days traveling to various points of interest. Tomorrow, we begin to look at the internship sites, something I am very excited to do. Since arriving, I’ve felt like I was on a vacation. There are no worries to be had, all the days are planned out and I have no responsibility. While that feeling is very nice, I am excited to really settle in and begin feeling like I live here. After I’ve gone through this city from corner to corner, I feel prepared and ready to indulge myself in the richness of South African life and culture. The culture here has been one of the most impactful parts of my stay thus far. Some aspects have been extremely difficult for me to deal with such as the slow paced lifestyle, fluid time keeping, openness to strangers, and slow dining out experiences- but these are all things I will learn to deal with in time.

Ava being a tourist having had her face painted at
Moyo at Spiers

With the amount of tourist things that I’ve done in the past two weeks, I’ve also had many meaningful experiences outside of that bright and happy realm. We visited a place called Khayelitsha, an informal settlement, or “township” that is one of the largest and oldest in Cape Town. It is actually still growing larger today. Before coming, I knew I would see the townships and I knew I would have a reaction to them but the exact parameters of that reaction were unclear to me. After seeing them from the bus window, I felt I knew the reality of the pictures I had seen online. After walking through the central market place of one, I knew the reality of the places I had just snapped 100 pictures of. Growing up in the Bronx, I was used to seeing poverty and living with people affected by poverty. When my mom lost her job, I experienced some of it myself. But seeing poverty in Cape Town had me sit down and re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about “real life”. I thought I knew what it meant to be tough and what it meant to be real and poor and living off of low means but the lifestyles of most South Africans completely trumps that. If you haven’t seen their living conditions in person it is impossible to explain over a blog post, but it is truly unbearable.

I have never felt pride for my country. Growing up just above the poverty line, then going below, then being just at it has always created a sense of resentment towards those who live well beyond their means and towards the US government. When I look at the CEO’s of the companies who caused the crash in 2008 that caused us to lose our house, I see that none of them have been burdened by the crash and I feel very angry. The South African people who live in poverty worse than I (and any person living in the US), who don’t have access to education, clean water, health care or work, have huge national pride. Why? It baffles me that when I, a white person from the states, go into a school here I am cheered for. All over the city people see we are from America and want pictures with us, want to talk to us and treat us like we are celebrities. I cannot wrap my head around their love for the very “race” of people who put them in their horrible positions. I cannot even walk down Greenwich Ave in Greenwich, CT (where I live now) without feeling disgust and bitterness, yet these Capetonians show us nothing but love and welcome. I have a lot to learn from Cape Town still, but for now I can only continue to process my experiences one day at a time.