Arriving and Week 1

Hello All,

I finally have the time to sit down and write about what is going on here. I am sorry this has taken me so long to do but they have kept us extremely busy and only recently have we begun to get into a routine. I have been here for about 10 days so far but it has felt like a lot longer and I will try to remember the important things that I have experienced.

Week 1: Orientation Week in Jo’burg

First off, when I arrived at JFK, there must have been over 70 students going to SA. It was an extremely exiting feeling which I thought kinda resembled the first days of college. After I think about an 18 hour flight we arrived in Johannesburg, or “Joburg” as they call it. There I was finally was able to see which SIT students were in my specific program. The group is huge because some students joined after the Kenya program was ended. I think there are 23 girls and 5 guys, which apparently ties the record for gentleman on the program. I am not exactly sure why men don’t go to SIT-maybe they don’t like to express their feelings which is essential to "experiential learning." The program director Vanessa seems very nice and is a “colored” from Zimbabwe. The academic director is named John Daniel who is from British decent and was in exile after leaving illegally to pursue college. When he was in SA, he was involved in the student originations and personally knew Steve Biko (he also is a coeditor of a book that I bought on Amazon about the current situation in the country.) We have two Zulu drivers/tutors, Langa and Stu, who I get along with very well.

Jo'burg

In Jo’burg, we were in a villa type place in a suburb outside of the city. We spent the next four days seeing the city and its surroundings. We saw the Apartheid Museum, which was created by a casino to get the lease (supposedly because the Apartheid gov’t didn’t allow casinos, the casino is some sort of example of freedom which is somewhat odd to me.) I loved seeing historic videos which gave me a visual into the things I’ve read. There was also a casspir you could get into, which were the huge and infamous anti-riot trucks the apartheid government used. The next day we went to the new Constitutional court which was built in the old holding cells during apartheid that almost every political prisoner spent time at awaiting trial. They kept some of the jail cells in place which I got in to try to understand what the living conditions for political prisoners was like. I enjoyed seeing the court which also had a really nice art gallery put together by one of the judges.

(Me at the court. Cow skin covers the front of the bench. The bricks are used from the old jail.)

After the court, we headed for the infamous Soweto. Soweto was awesome to see in person and definitely left me with a different feeling then what I’ve heard of the place. There were extreme levels of poverty, but also an awesome feeling of life and excitement that I did not feel in Jo’burg. In Soweto we visited a museum for the 1976 student uprising which was a huge turning point in the struggle. The museum was built on the street where the march took place and was dedicated to the first child killed by the police. After the Museum, we saw Nelson Mandela’s old house and a huge church that was used to hide the student organizers.

The orientation week in Jo’burg was nice but I was ready to settle down in Durban and feel that I was more then just a tourist seeing the sights….

The Drive into Kwa-Zulu Natal.