It's been a week already!

Howzit!? Yeah, I’m learning to speak Cape Townese, cause our orientation leaders keep teasing us about our American accents. All our “awesomes” and “sweets” really do sound ridiculous when they imitate it. I know this is realllly long, but I guess I’m half using this as a journal for myself, so read at your leisure or skip around or whatever.

Phew, so orientation is finally just about over. We had to go through a whole pre-registration process that involved standing in lines all day and checking passports/visas/insurance and everything else you could think of. We also got to know campus a little better by finding all the different departments (they call them faculties here) and having them pre-approve courses for us. You have to go to a different building to find out what time each class is, then another to find out where it is and who the professor is. They also like to say that they’ll do things “just now,” which, depending on how long you hold the first syllable of “just” can range anywhere from 10 minutes to never. We finally get to register on Friday morning and I think my ideal schedule, assuming everything works out, is going to be an intro to African music class, a medical anthropology class, and a history course on the different liberation movements in Southern Africa. Cool, huh? Well, I’m excited  Despite this whole process being kind of annoying after being used to signing up for classes online, in the end, you still get registered and it has been working just fine like this for over a hundred years here, so really you just get a little more exercise in the process and get to learn your way around a bit better. Corny as it sounds, it’s becoming painfully obvious how many Americans are used to having everything done instantaneously and conveniently. Like our one orientation speaker said, who cares if you have to make a sandwich (or two) while your email loads…it still loads in the end. And I like sandwiches.

Anyways, as another part of orientation, we got to have an African drum lesson! It was really fun because all 400 study abroad students were (trying) to play in sync, so the sound definitely carried. The leader showed us a couple different ways to hit it to make different sounds and then we repeated different rhythms back to him. Phil and Andrew, I hope I made you proud!

We also got a to visit one of the townships today with the student organization SHAWCO, which is the largest student-run volunteer program in the country. They travel to sites at four different townships and help kids 9-17 with school work, sports, and just any kind of mentoring. They also go to orphanages, do IT training, and young adult job skill mentoring. There’s obviously lots of different projects to get involved in with them, so I’ll get to pick one to sign up for sometime next week. It sounds like a really rewarding and eye-opening organization to get involved with. Even though the actual city of Cape Town has 3 million people, there were 2 million people in the one township that I visited alone, and it stretches as far as you can see in two directions. Many of the families live with 7 or more people in one room. Within the tourist-filled city and the safety of the campus, it’s easy to think of the South Africa as a wealthy nation, but it’s quite obvious that there is still a lot of development and social work that needs to happen here.

We also got to learn a bit of background on the University, which was an all-white University until the end of apartheid in 1994. They’ve done a ton of work to get the student population to begin to reflect the larger population of South Africa, and now the student population is just under 50% white, which clearly does not represent the whole population of the country, but certainly seems like significant progress for a country who does a lot of things “juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust now.” A lot of our orientation leaders were from other African countries too. If you want a crash-course in diversity, this seems like the place to be. Ok, enough ramblings for now. Sending love from Cape Town!