Hit the one month mark!

As of yesterday I have officially been out of the U.S. for a month…and as of today I have been in South Africa for a month. I can’t believe it has already been that long…and as my mother has reminded me several times (quite eagerly), I have less than four months left here! I’m sure it will continue to fly as quickly as the first one, but I am determined to make the best of it.

However, I did attempt to calculate my amount spent in one month last night and it was not a pretty figure…even with the exchange of dollars to rand working in our favor, trying to do any and everything there is to do gets expensive…and apparently eating like an American is not the most economically friendly way to survive! That’s just something I’ll have to keep in mind over the next few months!

Other than that I have only a few goals for the rest of my time here. Obviously to take advantage of every opportunity and make the best of it, but also… I would really like to be less of a tourist. I have been here for four and a half weeks and I have learned the ropes. I am settled into my home and school and mostly into my service site, so now it is time to hangout with the local friends I have made, some from UWC but many from my service, and to dive deeper into their culture. Yesterday I actually did get a little taste of life in the townships, and while it wasn’t always comfortable, it was the type of experience that I came here for.

Yesterday was my first day actually teaching my own literacy classes and I have to say it went very well. I was incredibly prepared with all of my new supplies and the lesson plans I worked on all weekend. Even though I have teachers (literacy teachers also from Amy Biehl -not from within the school) in two of the classes I teach, I let them know that I had lesson plans I wanted to try out and they let me lead the class while they took a back seat. Both teachers complimented my lesson, and one asked if I would lead every class, she said she learned a lot from watching me with them and she wanted to implement some of my plans into her other classes. This was really encouraging and I guess I had never thought about it before, but I obviously come from a different country and background so my approach is bound to be a bit different, and perhaps I just automatically do things that she wouldn’t have thought of before, and vice versa. Its definitely a learning experience for both of us, as well as for the students!

After my class ended I approached one of the teachers at the school to ask about the students’ access to books or to a library. I want to challenge them to read 4 books each in the next 4 months that I am here teaching the course, but I can’t ask them to do so unless I can offer a place for them to get books. While the school where I teach unfortunately does not have a library, I was told I could check another school in the area and if they had books that belong to the Amy Biehl Foundation, then I could take them for my class. So that is what I did! In order to get there I had to walk with Faith, a wonderful South African woman who works for Amy Biehl and with whom I teach my first class of the day, through the township of Nyanga (where our school is located) to catch a “taxi” to take to the other school. A taxi is different than a cab in the townships. A taxi is basically an unauthorized, overcrowded and less expensive van or cab ride. There is no company you call, you just stand on the side of the road and sometimes any random car just picks you up. Of course I had to be with locals, otherwise I wouldn’t know what car to get in to and which one to avoid, and I would stand out more than I already did being the only white person for a good 20 miles.

The experience and the ride were very interesting and as we walked down the streets in the township for a half an hour or so I for some reason kept thinking about my shoes. Not only is the fact that I have shoes significant considering how many people in the townships don’t have them to wear, but I also found myself privileged to walk these streets in them. I wondered if I could ever wear these same shoes in the U.S. again and not think about walking down this road, walking with these people, both literally and figuratively. I wondered if I would ever be the same person again after the things I am seeing and experiencing, if I could ever take such simple things for granted. While I am sure it will be easy to fall back into that mindset when I return home, I can certainly say that I don’t take those things for granted right now, and I hope that these shoes and these memories will help me to not take things for granted in the future. But just to make sure, I am already planning to come back here after these five months, whether sooner or later I don’t know, but I do know this is not my last time here. It has only been one month here and I still have over three more to go, but I am already struggling with the idea of leaving here in June, so I know I will definitely be back again.