Last days in Cape Town

I apologize for not writing in a while. Things have been busy here wrapping everything up. As most of you know, I get home on Friday! So, last week was my last week working at Brooklyn Chest hospital. The children had been practicing a performance for us on that last day. They danced and sang for us, it was so great. They were adorable. I left them with a few new soccer balls and frisbees with the hopes they keep running around even if I am not there every day after school with them. The children were upset when it was time for us to leave. Working at the TB hospital has been different than anything I have done before. I learned so much and hopefully made a difference for a few of those kids. It was definitely depressing at times to see such young kids going through more than I have in my life so far and probably more than I will ever have to go through.

While I was doing physical and health education with TB patients, here is what my other housemates were doing: Noah put a library into a high school that had nothing but empty shelves, now it has thousands of books. Lauren taught science lessons in a primary school that has no science curriculum. Claire did an art therapy program at the TB hospital. Mariah taught physical and health education to a group of 7th grade girls. Liz gave workshops to the teachers at a primary school on a variety of topics. Christopher implemented an after school reading program for his 7th grade class. Danielle organized all of the books in the library at a primary school as well as painted and cleaned the place up. Jesse implemented an English literacy program for men in a prison. David taught a life skills workshop also for men in a prison. And last but not least, Erin made a film with kids in an after school program as a way for them to portray life in their community and tell their stories.

I have said to my parents many times during the past few months that believe it or not this semester has probably made me more cynical than I expected. It is definitely a reality check going into these communities and realizing how much there is to be done and how little you can do. I quickly had to accept the fact that I was one person with few resources, no money, and limited time. This was frustrating and I can speak for almost everyone in my house. Some days we would come home from our various sites and just ask each other, "why are we even bothering?" But in addition to the negativity, frustrations, and disappointments about not being able to fix South Africa, the accomplishments I listed above are impressive and hopefully will give just one person a little more hope and inspiration to either improve their own life or improve their community.

South Africa has so much potential. Apartheid ended just 14 years ago and already such strides have been made. To their credit, things shouldn't be okay just yet. 14 years is nothing and Apartheid is a lot to come back from and a lot to forgive people for. I am confident that as time goes on, people will mend and races will blend again.

I will miss the beauty of this country and the unique way of life that people live here. I am sad to leave my housemates who I have grown closer to than I ever imagined possible. On the other hand, it will be nice to have a dryer, not have to grocery shop/cook for myself all the time, use Internet that does not go by megabytes (I STILL don't understand megabytes), and of course get back to my family and friends in one piece which my parents doubted at one time.

Many of us have been rehearsing on what to say when people back home ask "How was South Africa?" No one can think of an answer. "Good? Amazing? Different? Roller coaster? Interesting?" probably every adjective possible. I hope to be back one day as well as continue seeing other parts of the world. Hope you have all enjoyed reading my blog!

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