Drew's internship as already surpassed all expectations

I just finished my first week working at the Cape Town Refugee Center with one of my co-educators, Molly Miller. We are working on a EU funded project called the Enhanced Civic Understanding and Engagement Project. We aim to educate refugees about their own rights, how they can protect them in their host country, how they can hold the government accountable for respected and fulfilling their rights, and how they can be active participants in a democracy where they may not have citizenship status. We do this through conducting community assessments and running educational workshops for refugees. We also educate local government officials, social service providers, police forces, and community leaders about refugee rights and how they are legally obligated to respect their rights and also how refugees can and frequently are contributing and positive members of the new societies they are integrating into. Finally we also aim to help several Community Based Refugee Organizations become more sustainable and train them on how to run our civic engagement workshops so that organizations in the communities with the most refugees will continue to give access to the information we are trying to make more accessible.

What has struck me most about my internship so far is how equal we are treated next to our coworkers. The whole week we participated in round table discussions regarding the formulation of our curriculums, budgets, and trainings. Around the table sat the program director, the director of the Cape Town Refugee Center, the curriculum developer, the advocacy director, and seven refugees from places such as Rwanda, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All of these individuals have had extensive experience working with refugees, understand the adversity they face in their home communities and have been working towards sustainable solutions to those issues for years. Molly and I have been in the country 3 weeks and have minimal experience working with refugees. Regardless we sit at the same table as these extremely qualified and insightful individuals and aren’t only encouraged but are expected to voice our opinions and contribute regularly and our opinions are taken with equal weight as everyone else’s.

On Friday CTRC brought us to the South African Parliament to attend an information session regarding Parliament’s processes and take a tour of the buildings that hosted their legislative branch. We did not expect to be invited to be part of the President’s Honorable Civil Guard during his State of the Nation address this upcoming Saturday. I would like to stress that we are Americans who have been in South Africa for three weeks.

The opportunities that have been presented to us through our internship within the first week surpassed all of my expectations for the entire study abroad program. It is overwhelming and extremely exciting. There is also a pressure to deliver a product proving we are deserving of the generosity they have already shown us, although I am positive we will get more out of this program than the program will get out of us. I am excited to confront this challenge as the semester continues and keep you all updated along the way.

Parliament