Hi everyone!This is a new blog, so I'm still figuring out how to do everything - hopefully I'll be able to upload pictures to this as I go :)
Well I arrived safely in Cape Town, South Africa nearly a week ago and since then our program has had a hectic flurry of orientation activities, trips and sightseeing to kick off our semester abroad. We started with a cable car ride up Table Mountain, and since then we went to a fancy restaurant with African dance and drums in Stellenbosch, toured three of our potential service sites, visited the Bo Kaap for a day, and most recently we had a tour of a township, which included drumming ending with lunch at Mzoli's Meat.
It's a very
meat-heavy cuisine, so I've eaten a lot of chicken, but I've already sampled springbok sausage, ox tail, ostrich, and antelope as well. One of my favorite meals was in the Bo Kaap, a traditionally 'colored' Muslim neighborhood. The people who live there are, for the most part, the descents of Indian and Malaysian slaves, many of whom would cook for the Dutch settlers. The local cuisine had a lot of traditional Indian spices but it was very mild, and I kept thinking about how much my mom would love that. Our lunch also had meat & veggie samosas, and ended with homemade donuts and tea. We were hosted by a wonderful woman who couldn't join us because she was fasting.The people in my
program are fantastic & a lot of fun - there are ten of us who will be living and taking classes together, so we've done a lot of bonding since we got here. Four of us go to GW, which is a really crazy coincidence in a program this small! We moved into our CIEE house on Friday, so last night we hosted a braai (cookout) to get to know our neighbors from the arts & sciences program. The group seems really fantastic and everyone is excited to start our classes and service work!We're still in the p
rocess of choosing our sites, so I don't know yet where I will be working, but right now my top two choices are Yabonga and Young in Prison. Yabonga works with children who have been affected by HIV & AIDS, whether they or their parents are affected by the disease. Young in Prison works with young men 12-24 years old in prisons and safehouses. Tomorrow we'll be touring the last two service sites: an elementary school and a high school.
