Welcome to Africa

After a nine-hour transatlantic flight, a two-hour layover in the Netherlands, and a second, eleven-hour trans-African flight, our group landed, tired and jet-lagged, in Cape Town, South Africa. We passed customs and collected our baggage without a hitch, and before long were back at our hotel. The guys’ room was on the fourth floor and had a ridiculous view of the beach on one end and Table Mountain on the other. We lucked out big-time. The five of us ended up playing Hearts for a few hours into the night before exhaustion caught up with us and we passed out.

Sunday morning we woke up, grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel, and headed out to convert currency. Tasnim decided it would be a smart idea to spend our first day getting to know Cape Town a bit better. We started off by taking a bus tour around the city, where we got see and hear about cool places like Table Mountain and District Six.

Later the group caught a ferry to Robben Island to see the facility where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment. We got on another bus that took us around the island before getting off and walking through some of the actual prisons (there are four on the island). The bus and walking tours were both led by ex-political prisoners who were held on the island, so it was interesting to hear a first hand account of their experience. We actually witnessed an awkward situation in which one of the tourists, a racially-ambiguous South African, apparently cracked an offensive joke which our tour guide called him out for. It was a weird reminder of how all of South Africa’s racial issues weren’t resolved with a single rugby match like the movie Invictus would have us believe. Other than that encounter though, the island tour was actually pretty sweet, and we even got to see some penguins (apparently there are hundreds of them on the island).

The next stop for the day was an outdoor concert on the slopes leading up to Table Mountain. The scenery and view was incredible, and the concert was actually a lot of fun too. The band was a pretty cool electronic/pop group called Goldfish, but the most interesting part of the experience was the crowd. There were literally people of all ages there, from toddlers to teenagers, plenty of middle-aged men and women, and even an elderly couple or two.

Though the day was filled with activities, the real fun begins tomorrow. For the next week, our group of seventeen Yalies will be volunteering in the township of Mfuleni, about an hour outside of Cape Town. While there, we will be working with a few organizations, primarily a German NGO called Power-Child Campus and a children’s home called Masigcine. Both places are dedicated to helping children of the impoverished township, with Power-Child Campus providing meals and after-school programs for kids of all ages and Masigcine providing food and shelter for infants and toddlers who have been orphaned or neglected, many of which are also HIV positive.

A lot of us are going into the experience with different expectations, but hopefully we’ll all be able to get something out of it, even if it’s not what we were originally expecting.

- Rick Caraballo