Hey!
Short update for today, my program is going out tonight to a vineyard for a welcome dinner and I need to make myself presentable before then! Yesterday and today we spent a lot of time hearing about a lot of the volunteer opportunities here in Cape Town. Cape Town, and South Africa in general, are in a really awkward place in their development. Because of the apartheid, incredibly infrastructure exists alongside mass poverty. Most South Africans live below the poverty line, and access to things like clean, running water can be difficult. There have been books written on this subject, so I won’t bore everyone with the details.
Essentially, the downtown and touristy areas of Cape Town are insanely beautiful and well kept, while there exists a great number of townships and shanty towns where the inhabitants live in shacks. We toured several places with volunteer opportunities today, including a charter school that caters to low income students from townships, and a government funded hospital for citizens with TB. I am most interested in an opportunity to work in the administration of a small non-profit that provides counseling and medical care to children with HIV. I will update more about this later!
Xoxo,
Sara
No comments:
Post a Comment