Table Mountain

Yesterday we took the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain. We had our weekly reflection session on top of the mountain. We had to bring an item that represented something positive from this semester. I brought a stone from the path up to Rhodes Memorial, which represented two of my favorite days here. One was hiking with David and Christopher when we got caught in the dark coming down from Devil's Peak and the other was when almost the entire group hiked Devil's Peak and everyone made it to the top. The scenery from Table Mountain is amazing as you will see in these pictures. You could see the new World Cup stadium from the top. South Africa is struggling to decide what to do with it now because of how expensive it is to keep it up. There is talk about demolishing it, which is sad because of how much money was invested to build it JUST for the World Cup. We got tickets to the USA vs. South Africa game at that stadium on Nov. 17th which I am psyched about!

Hospital Pics

I have one more week at the hospital. It is definitely going to be sad to leave these kids. Yesterday we brought plain white t-shirts for them to paint. They could not understand why we would ever ask them to PAINT on a new shirt. They all have very few clothes and most are old and torn. They were so excited to see we had bought them new t-shirts and became noticeably upset when we told them we were painting them. Some warmed up to the idea others just wanted a nice new clean shirt. I thought it was interesting because it is something we do all the time in the States but I did not even think about how they would react to this.

African Sunrise

Hospital Update

I have a new focus for my capstone project at the TB hospital. The teacher is allowing me to teach a health class the last hour of the day. The first theme I decided to do is conflict resolution. Today was my first lesson and there are definitely challenges. First of all, the language barrier is frustrating. I have kids that can translate from English to Afrikaans but I do not have kids that can translate from English to Xhosa unfortunately. Those are the two languages that the children at the school speak. So the lesson was going well as I went through the steps to resolving conflicts and each child made a poster of these steps to hang in their ward and refer to. At the end I had them pair up to role play conflict scenarios and then show how they could resolve it. I assumed the scenarios would be somewhere along the lines of arguing over a toy or accusing someone of not playing fairly. Well, there were three skits. The first was about a drug deal, the second was about robbing someone on the street with a gun, and the third was about robbing a store with guns. The way they were resolved was either by punching someone in the face or shooting them .................for some reason I feel like they missed the point. The teacher just laughed and said "well this is South Africa for you!" There is always tomorrow I suppose :)

Cape Point

Saturday we went to the Cape Point. The attractions there include African penguins, baboons, and beautiful scenery! We have to drive through the mountains to get there and at one point we pulled over to watch a baboon put on quite the show for us. He was sitting on top of a lady's car while she was in there. Her husband could not get into the car because if he opened the door, the baboon might go into the car as well. Another man pulled over to take pictures of this, leaving his car windows open. The baboon then scurried across the street and hopped into his vacant car. He was even in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel at one point. We watched this go on for about 15 minutes and got some pretty funny pictures of it.

The Girl Effect: The Clock is Ticking

The video below about gender inequality was shown in my Poverty and Development class today and I thought it was really well done. It is just 3 minutes, check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8xgF0JtVg