Bryan recaps his 2nd week

This blog post covers what I did in South Africa from January 24-31^st. I thought that this week included many interesting things, but first we will start with the Braai which is the South African equivalent to a BBQ. The Braai was hosted by Vernon at his home where he made us almost what seemed like three courses, which was completely new to me, because when I attend BBQ’s at home its usually just a ton of food placed out, but at the Braai there was the appetizers then the first course which included snook and chili and then the main course when was lamb, and chicken.

The next interesting thing that I want to talk about in this blog was the fact that we finally had to do two things that were outside of the tourist realm. The event was we attended our first classes the first class being a double session of Vernon’s class which was interesting. The second class was led by Marita and we got to learn about Race through several different lenses. The next event was the Public transportation exercise which was actually kind of weird. The exercise involved each person being put into a group of 4 or more and having to follow the specific transportation method made by Vernon to reach a destination which was one of the internships. My group had to catch a Minibus Taxi to my Internship Right2Know which was actually pretty easy and was as familiar as taking a city bus back in the states except the drivers don’t care about the rules of the road and only want to get places as fast as possible while making as much money as possible.

The Last interesting thing I want to mention was the visits to everyone’s internships, although the internships took a full three days to complete it was a wonderful experience getting to see firsthand what everyone in the group was interested in. I believe that by viewing them in person, offered another sense of what my co educators wanted to do. For example when some wanted to be in the health profession, it was a completely different experience when we went to the hospitals and saw patients who were sick, or just out of surgery trying to make the best of the situations that they were in. Overall I think the internships really showed us just how different we really are from one another and how our diversity makes us that much more unique. 

Then again our diversity can also be a bad thing like in the case of consensus decision making where we literally took about an hour and a half discussing when we should have class and we couldn’t really make progress after about the 30^th minute. At this point in time it just became a discussion about the same problem over and over while offering the same unpopular solutions which were continuously supported by the same opinion, but rephrased differently. This of course made me understand that in a vote there are losers, but in a consensus we all technically win but we also technically lose (especially our youth).