First of many to come

So I've never done this blogging thing, but I've had enough requests from back home for a blog while abroad that I thought I should look into it. It feels weird starting it now when so much has already happened in the week and a bit that I've been in South Africa. The American students (all eight of us) arrived here on July 2nd after about 20 hours of travel. The plane trip was fairly nice in the sense that there was plenty of entertainment (a must for me personally). I think I watched about five movies. The plan ride was about 14 hours unfortunately and I couldn't get myself to sleep at all, which was more than a little upsetting... until I just accepted it and watched more movies.

We talked a lot about culture shock during our orientation in New York, but so far the culture hasn't been that shocking. Yes the past week most of the students in the IHRE program (including the Americans) stayed in a rural area, which included a home-stay with a poor family from a neighboring village, but to me it felt more like a slightly more academic camp experience. The hardest thing so far for me has been learning everyone's names. I'm normally horrible at learning names, and now that the majority of people I encounter have non-western names it has proven even harder to learn them. I'm doing my best.

I don't know how I'll post for the whole past week. I think too much happened to adequately post now. I'll do a brief summary of the experience I guess. We got on the bus from our hotel and found that the bus was jammed with a bunch of Wits students we had never met. We stayed mainly in our respective groups for most of the trip. Once we got to Wits rural (about 10 hours later, factoring in breaks at quite a few scenic stops) we started actually meeting the other students. There were about 50 students at the camp in total. We were broken up into cabins of about six students each, each cabin fitted with bunk beds a la most of my camp experiences in the past. We played soccer together and I was continuously found introducing myself to people whose names I forgot about five seconds later. Such is life.

Throughout the week we had a couple of lectures geared towards human rights and rural South Africa. The lectures, for the most part, were very interesting, but I found myself being most academically challenged at the end when the lecturer would ask for questions and Wits students would ask some truly interesting and insightful questions. I've been very impressed by the other students on this program. Anyways, we also got to go to Kruger National Park where we were lucky enough to see some elephants, giraffes and zebras. I got quite a few good pictures. Apparently our program is having a photo contest. I don't think my pictures are contest-winning, but I'll enjoy sharing them with people. I'd attach a few here, except my camera is a tad out of batteries, and I don't have a converted yet, so I can't recharge it. Hopefully I'll be able to do so soon.

We also visited a center for orphans and vulnerable children and we got to play with them in small groups one of the days. My group had a lot of fun playing the games we would play with the kids while we were deciding which ones to teach them. I think we had more fun than the kids did. Our groups then were assigned to different rural homes and we stayed overnight with our hosts. I helped cook pap, a traditional South African dish. It looks like mashed potatoes but is made out of mealie meal and definitely doesn't taste like potatoes. It's actually really good. I felt a little useless during the home-stay though because my single fluent language of English wasn't quite good enough to promote communication. So instead of having deep conversations with anyone I mainly just played with the youngest daughter. She was quite interested in me, most likely because I was the first white person she had ever seen who wasn't on television. She sat on my lap for the majority of the night and kept trying to talk to me. I of course could only smile and nod at her. I hope I didn't give her the impression that all white people were complete idiots.

In the morning we went with our host to some houses in her village who had victims of HIV/AIDS. Our host is a volunteer caregiver for her community. I'm glad we had the opportunity to actually see the affects of this disease on one of the poor communities of South Africa, since it is such a problem in this country and we'll be talking about it in our classes. Wits teachers actually urge all students to get tested so that they can understand what the test is like. I'm planning on doing it while I'm here, especially since it's free. I'm obviously not expecting a positive test result, but it will be interesting to see what the test entails. I've been told that it's important to understand it and getting tested yourself before telling others to get tested.

Anyways, now everyone is back on campus and the international students are settled into the international house. My room has a little kitchen area and a private bathroom, which is quite luxurious compared to my experience with dorms. However, it does mean we are expected to cook for ourselves, which I am not very excited for. We're going shopping tomorrow for produce and cooking supplies. I wish I had a chance to talk to my mom to figure out what cooking staples I should be sure to get. I guess there's always the chance to go back to store. Apparently there's a Pick 'n Pay (grocery store) right off of campus which I'm sure I'll become very familiar with. Most of the Wits students in the program do not stay on campus, which is a bizarre concept for me coming from a college with a 98% rate of people living on campus. This does mean they will have cars though, which I hope to be able to make use of.

Classes start on Monday. We officially registered for them today and while I'm a little sad that all of my friends from home are enjoying summer vacation right now, I am actually fairly excited about my classes. All classes have an emphasis on human rights, but my concentrations will be: state sovereignty, media, politics and looking at human rights from a psycho-social perspective. I also will be interning at an organization called probono (http://www.probono-org.org/home.html). I'm not sure if I'm interested in law as a possible career, but I'm hoping to get some direction based on my reaction to this internship site.

Since it's Friday night, most of the students I've met are at scattered bars throughout the area (American students celebrating the 18 yr drinking age), but we have had very little (if any) time to actually decompress since we started this program, so I'm taking time tonight to relax. I've been reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I picked it up in the airport, though I barely read it on the plane because I was too busy watching movies (no, I am not ashamed). I have been really enjoying it though, so maybe I'll read a bit, figure out what I need to buy tomorrow at the grocery store and then get to bed.