Bryan believes his time in Cape Town helped him explore himself.

Now that I have been home for almost 4 months I can’t help, but to think of Cape Town as a closed chapter in my life (at the moment). Since I returned to the states I have not had many opportunities to share what Cape Town is like or even look back at the pictures from my time there, but I feel that its due to me getting right back into the groove of things as a recent grad I feel like there wasn’t enough time to really self-reflect when dealing with more pressing matters. The faint memories that I have of the trip are less to do with the extracurricular aspects like seeing exotic animals like lions, or trying new foods, but are all of the people that I was able to interact with and the moments that I spent self-reflecting in Cape Town. One thing that I still find amazing is my memory of the Environment if you will, for example I can remember how to get to my old internship and I remember how the house we stayed at was set up and the address. I can even perfectly describe the Rondebosch Commons and the Mountains further out as if these images have been engrained.

I believe that Cape Town provided me with the ability to really visualize what I want the world around me to represent personally and professionally. Unlike most people I can’t say that I feel that I have changed from the person who I was prior, but I believe that Cape Town gave me the confidence and the ability to show traits of myself that I didn’t have an outlet to reveal or was too afraid to show. I believe that this program did a great job helping me explore myself whether it be a deeper understanding of my personality with the Myers-Briggs Indicator and learning how to expand and improve less developed areas for INTJs. Alternatively it could be the internship that I had which showed me an outsider perspective of my career field and showed me the amount of work required to be successful at grassroots organizing and tackling social issues. It could even be the day to day conversations with my co-educators and random citizens of Cape Town, who through discussion of the world helped me to solidify my goals that I had prior to leaving the U.S.

If I could rate the program I believe I would give it a solid 8/10 as a minimum the program really does try to take students out of their comfort zones and forces them to adapt to situations whether that be understanding how the transportation system works, understanding the various languages, or even understanding the social and economic factors that have made South Africa into the country that you see today. If there was anything that I could change I would have loved to stay in the townships, rather than the suburbs of Rondebosch where students can complain about bad Wi-Fi, appliances, insects, and many more insignificant “problems”. I say this only, because I believe that most students leaving the U.S. to travel abroad to South Africa understand the well-off side of the spectrum of economic disparity, but they don’t necessarily get to see the extreme poverty and how living in areas like townships will affect every aspect of your life. But when we only have to interact with coworkers who live in townships or go to work in townships for a part of the day in some cases. I feel as though we are using our privilege of wealth to escape the harsh reality that most people face which rubs me as exploiting the people who live there for personal gain.