A New Continent...

So I have safely arrived in Cape Town and am beginning to get settled in here! There are ten other students in my program, CIEE Service-Learning, and we all seem to be getting along really well so far! For the first few days of my orientation we were staying in a really nice hotel in the heart of Cape Town, right at the foot of Table Mountain! It is absolutely gorgeous here, seeing the mountain right in the middle of the city is such a magnificent sight and I really hope it never gets old! We moved into our house yesterday - it is a spacious and airy place right off of the University of Cape Town Campus. I share it with the other members of my group and with Thandie, our RA who is a graduate student at UCT. I share a room with a girl named Katherine (she lived on my friend Maryn's hall at St. Lawrence University before transferring to Northeastern, such a small world!) and the house has four bathrooms, nine bedrooms, a kitchen with three fridges, and two stoves, and a common living area. It really is a great place to live - except that like most of the buildings here, there is no heat! And yes I am in Africa but it is winter here and the days have been raw and rainy so far, there is no escaping the cold!

I have learned more about what it is I will actually be doing here, yay! I will be taking five classes which include a few sociology-type classes, an African language course, and then my service-based research and capstone project. We went into the townships for the first time today, (which are the very poor areas on the outskirts of Cape Town) where we will be doing our service portion of the program. We get to decide where we would like to serve, some of the options include primary schools, high schools, an orphanage, a pre-trial mentoring program for young males, a TB/HIV and AIDs clinic, or a shelter for abused teenaged girls. We still have to see some of the sites but I am excited to start thinking about where it is I may like to work and what my project may be. Through my service work I will have to identify a specific need for the people in that community and through research and time spent there, come up with a capstone project idea that will hopefully provide a solution that will last long beyond my time here!