Friday, June 19, 2009

My fellowship requires that I have a development plan while I am here in SA. I have thought about it a little and have jotted down some goals. The purpose of this blog is so that as I work to complete my goals I can get feedback on my experiences from my family and friends on what I could be doing different, general thoughts, or any other constructive comments. I have yet to develop a sold plan. I think I am going to wait and see how my first week goes to see what goals are feasible during this 2 month time frame on the job and off the job. One thing that is definite is that I plan to keep up with the local news to increase my awareness about local life as well as events that relate to my volunteer work. Today in the Cape Town Daily it reported that 1 in 4 South African has admitted to raping a young girl! This number is insane. This statistic was a part of an article about the celebration of Youth Day on June 16, in commemoration of the student uprising in Soweto during apartheid. A girl was taken from her school on this day and was found raped in killed in a bush. People really do know how to spoil a special holiday…..

Today was my first day visiting the job site. They told me I didn’t have to come in until Monday but I was just too anxious to meet my new coworkers. I sat down with the head of the organization, Norton Tennille, who gave be a run-down of the goals of the Early Childhood Development Program. I will be working closely with this program. He shared also shared some of his concerns about coming year at SAEP. Next year all the schools will be closing down for the FIFA world cup that is taking place in Cape Town. Mass construction has been taking place to prepare the city to host, to include an extensive subway system between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Norton foresees two problems with the event: first, volunteers for SAEP will have difficulty finding housing in Cape Town and the cost of living will go up for them which could discourage volunteer participation and second, is finding time for the kids to make up the schooling that is missed which could have detrimental impact on the metric (testing), that already suffers from low scores.

As far as work assignments go, I think I am going to have a really awesome project, however, my skills set for the assignment do not seem to match but I will work it out. My mentor, Isabel, wants me to spend time evaluating the progress of the crèches (early childhood development schools). New crèches have recently been opened, and my job will be to do research on both the old and new crèches and to make some kind of conclusion on how all of them can be improved in general and how the new ones can get caught up. Isabel said I will be doing a lot interviewing of people out in the townships to aid in my understanding of the progress. I am most excited about this as interacting with the people should be an extraordinary experience. My office has over 25 interns and there are large clusters from different schools. There is a large group from UNC, another from Duke, and Yale. The there are two Stanford Students and one girl from BYU. My first day meeting all of them they declared the first office outing, a Happy Hour at a bar called MOJO in Observatory. It was a lot of fun and my first time hanging out at a bar other than when I have been with my family. The only time I can remember going to a bar before was when I was in Japan with my aunt. We went to an ice bar and I think I drank juice!