How I ended up going to South Africa.

This starts in 3rd grade with my teacher Mrs. Praisner. She was a world traveler and loved to teach us about the different places she had traveled. One of her favorite places she had been was Kenya and every year her class would give these big reports to all the other classes and the parents. In my eyes at the time, Kenya and Africa were one and the same. I loved learning about the vast wild and all the animals and the great variety of culture that existed in this place. From that day on Africa fascinated me and I knew it was a place I wanted to go. At the end of the year we wrote an essay about the places we wanted to go and I said I wanted to go to Kenya. From that day on I always held this interest and intrigue to the continent and continued to learn more and more about it.

Eventually I started to grow up and I've come to realize that I have the oppurtunity to accomplish many of the things I've always want to do. The realization of the power I finally had over my life to do these things came when I was freshman year of college I decided I was going to grow a ponytail like I had always wanted. Why growing a ponytail was always a dream of mine, I'm not quite sure. It was probably from watching too many Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal movies, so I have my dad to thank for that. For whatever the reason was I'm not quite sure, but it was a dream I had, and even though very few people supported the dream, finally accomplishing it was a great feeling.

With this in mind I started to ponder studying abroad. It took me a very long time to make a decision on whether I wanted to go because I wasn't sure I was willing to give up a semester with my friends at the place that I love most in this world: St. Mike's. I kept on thinking it over and talking to people who have done it and it seemed like it was an oppurtunity I would always regret if i didn't do it. I only had 1 place in mind when I started to look at my options and it was Africa. I would have loved to actually go to Kenya, but that was on the dangerous countries list, so I had to look elsewhere.

One of the things I have found that I find the most pleasurable in my life is doing service work, so since I have all my classes in line to graduate, I thought why not spend the semester doing service work. There were a few different programs in Africa that offered service work, but Stellenbosch University through AIFS was the only one that also offered service work with a college experience and time taking classes as well. This was also important to me because I think it will be such a cool experience learning from a different point of view in a different culture. I think it will really broaden the way I learn and will be something that I hold onto and benefit from the rest of my life.

This program had all the things I was looking for and now I can feel that satisfaction once again of doing something that I've wanted to do almost my whole life... That ponytail feeling.