I finally have arrived in South Africa!

Note that this post and statement were written not after day 1, but on day 3. Due to lack of internet capabilities and having to leave my computer with IT to get registered, I wasn’t able to even write a blog post, never mind posting it. However today was the first time I actually felt I was in South Africa… or at least the real South Africa. I will get to explaining that later, but first I will tell of my first two days.

Day 1
After going to bed late the night we arrived we didn’t get to sleep in, but rather had to meet for orientation at 9AM. We headed first to the student center, the Neelsie, to get money from the ATM and grab some breakfast. I might not have mentioned this before, but Stellenbosch University has about 20,000 students so I am getting a different cultural experience and a different college experience at a school 10 times the size of St. Mike’s. With this being said, the Neelsie is quite different that Alliot because the student center is comprised of more than just a cafeteria (weird right?). This student center has lots of different stores and a food court with different food options. We got money from the ATM and it was nice to see my bank account multiply 7 times what it was when I left because it was in Rands instead of dollars, although 1 rand does not buy you the same as what 1 dollar would. Food is about 2/3 what it is in America so my average meal has been around $5 or 35 Rand instead of $7.50 at home I would spend on the same thing.

After Breakfast we headed to a meeting to get informed a little more about what was going on. They explained how the university works and a little bit of background. Explained how internet worked and how we had to pay for every megabit that we use, but that a significant amount was already allotted to us. It was a little long, but made me have a much better understanding of what was going on. Then we went to the grocery store to get food to cook in our kitchens. This was an experience all in its own because I’ve never really cooked very much for myself, so I was a little lost. It was reassuring to see that pretty much every guy was lost and none of us could cook. I hit all the things that I knew that were easy enough for me to cook, so I left with pasta, rice, frozen pizza, and stuff to make grilled cheese. This I feel will be what I will be eating a lot of here in South Africa, but at least they are all things that I like a lot.

At orientation they told us that since it’s the beginning of their school year here that freshman orientation was going on and told us of the events that we couldn’t miss. That night we went to see trollies. Apparently the shopping cart was invented in South Africa and they are very proud of this, so every year each freshman residence hall decorates a cart and they race them down a hill around obstacles. This definitely intrigued all of us, so we went to watch it. All of us live in different buildings and no one had a cell phone yet, so it was a little difficult to plan going all together. We just went the 4 of us that live in my flat block, which was me and Pablo and then his girlfriend Casey and my friend Sarah. Since they come from Stonehill and we come from St. Mike’s we assumed we would get there and be able to find everyone else. This was incorrect. We were by no means prepared by what we saw: thousands of people lining the street with bleachers full of the first year students dressed up, painted, chanting, and cheering as loud as possible. When walking there it sounded like we were coming to a professional sporting event from the amount of noise that was being made. The atmosphere was crazy and I’ve never seen so much enthusiasm coming from anyone. I was extremely impressed by the level of participation these people were putting into this event, definitely more than I’ve ever seen at St. Mike’s. After about an hour we had gotten tired of fighting the crowd and headed to eat. It was around 8 when we were done and headed back. When we got back to the flat we noticed a bunch of other people from our program that live in the block next to ours and hung out with them the rest of the night. It wasn’t anything real crazy, but everyone was pretty much just trying out the local wine and hanging out. It was fun and got a chance to know a bunch of other kids better.
After that day, we all had come to a few realizations. The first one is that there are a lot less black people at Stellenbosch University that we thought there would be, that the 70/30 ratio that I read on their Wikipedia page was extremely lenient estimate and I would be surprised if 15% of the students were black. The second was that I was unaware that Afrikaans was their first language here and the one that they speak in all the time, although everyone knows English as well. The third was that South Africans are beautiful! I would say that 75% of the girls are very hot and the boys are about the same. No one is out of shape or fat and all the guys are built for rugby and are giant. I am like 4 inches below average height and 50 pounds of muscle underweight. 75% of the people are blonde hair and blue eyed making up what I would imagine the world that Hitler had in mind looked like.

Day 2
The next day was more of the same thing, getting a tour of campus and having meetings with our program advisor about our classes. We got more information on the service learning program and found out it started Thursday. Come dinnertime, Pablo and I went out to dinner with 3 of the guys from the block next door at an Irish Pub in town. We had a good time and eventually dinner turned into the whole evening when a bunch of the other people in our program met up with us there for drinks. We spent most of the night admiring how beautiful the South African race is and joking around. Me and Sol made friends with some South Africans watching football from England. They were real friendly and very accepting of us. They were South African, but not Afrikaan so they were our size and had dark hair. They told us how just because we aren’t as big as the other guys that we still have a shot with the girls. This was very reassuring to me and Sol and was also told that the girls LOVE AMERICAN ACCENTS! Who would have thought that it works in other countries like accents work for guys in America? We headed home around midnight because a bunch of us had to go for our service learning orientation at 8:30 the next morning.

Day 3
I was pretty excited about getting started so quickly with the service learning portion of my stay here because that’s why I really chose to come here. The 24 of us, 14 with my program and 10 from other international programs were picked up and driven by van about 10 minutes outside of Stellenbosch to Lynedoch, this sustainable community and school school for black South African children whose parents work on the wine vineyards. These families have about 5 children and only make about $100 a month. It was not until I arrived here that I finally felt like I was really in South Africa. The drive helped as well, seeing some zebras and ostriches, but this community of children was what did it for me. Here we met our teacher, Grant, who is one of the coolest guys ever. He grew up in the same community that the kids did and went to this school. He then went on to further education and works as a professor at Stellenbosch University. Listening to him talk is like listening to a motivational speaker nonstop. His words are so inspiring and are able to put things in a way that was able to move everyone. He showed us the unofficial national anthem, the Shosholoza, and told us that the 1st half is not South Africa, but the 2nd half is truly South African. Please watch the youtube link to understand what he was saying. Then he brought some kids in to sing and dance along to it. It was awesome! He told us that we would be working with them for the next couple of months. He let us go and meet them during their recess. Unfortunately there was a little bit of a language barrier between us so I immediately decided to speak the universal language with them instead… FOOTBALL! I played with some of the little kids and was beat quite a few times. They were under the impression that since I was bigger and older than them that I would be good, but they were wrong. They were extremely accepting and loved playing with me. Grant explained later to us that they were so receptive to us because to them white people were the rich farm owners and their parents’ bosses. They had never been seen or respected by any white person before and to them this was an amazing achievement. He told us to use this to our advantage, but also to break this barrier.

He explain that they believe that service needs to be on an even level meaning without thinking or acting that we are superior. I don’t think that this will be much of a problem to me because being in their culture, I feel like I’m the one that doesn’t know what’s going on. I feel like the unintelligent one. I also feel after learning about their extremely difficult life of poverty, disease, and struggle that they have and then seeing their smiles and happiness that they have a knowledge and understanding of life far superior to my own. I hope that as I teach them that they in turn teach this happiness to me. He also explained that our work needs to be sustainable so that after service is given the community does not falter when the volunteers leave, like in this case at the end of the semester. With this in mind he says we need to be transferring a skill to assure this, which in this case will be knowledge. We will be working with them in class and apparently planning our own lessons to do this. This although seems like a challenge and we haven’t been given the full details so I’m still curious, seems to be something that I will love doing. I don’t think that if I could have dreamed up what I wanted to do it could have been anymore perfect than this. Just from the little time that we spent with the children, their energy and happiness was infectious and spread to all 24 of us. This is the kind of service and the community that I have always wanted to work in. I’ve always felt like I would be able to offer this situation something special and I’ve always hoped to learn that happiness that doesn’t need money or material goods. This knowledge is something that I’ve always felt is very rare to genuinely find in America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saJmOw0GGyI