Joburg!

Okay so normally I won’t blog 2 days back to back, but we did a lot today and I have some free time now so I thought I’d share with everyone! We started the day off with going to the Apartheid museum, here in Joburg. It was really cool to get some history behind the country we are going to call home for the next 3 months. I copied down some of the information from one of the placards in the museum, it read:

“By 1960 the efforts by apartheid state to contain the size of urban African population had failed. State planners developed the policy of population removals: forcibly uprooting whole communities of people, considered by the state to be ‘surplus’ to the labour needs of the cities or otherwise inappropriately located. Removals began mid 1960’s and ten years later over 1.5 million people had been relocated to black resettlement camps, suitably far removed from white areas.”

The museum was filled with information just like this… it was really sad to see and we definitely went through many emotions to say the least. Some people were feeling guilty and so a group of us talked about it with sour student life coordinator, Leslie (who is absolutely amazing). A woman from western Africa came up to us and said she felt guilty, because her ancestors sold her own people into slavery. It’s an interesting feeling, because even though we have not directly enslaved anyone we feel the pain and we empathize with those who have been hurt by our ancestors.

After the museum we met up with a woman named Alina who showed us around Soweto (South west township). There is a lot of government subsidized housing that people are able to get for different levels of income. It was really fascinating to see the different “levels” of housing there were and just see the communities that people live in. She took us to her restaurant for lunch and we had a real African meal with chicken, lamb, corn and potato dishes and a couple other random things I can’t remember. It was pretty good, definitely different from the U.S. and I’m already missing Chipotle uh oh. And when we were done with lunch some of the boys from the neighborhood danced for all us, it was FLIPPIN’ AMAZING!!!! There really isn’t anyway to describe it, but I wish I could dance like that. After that we saw Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s house. It’s the only street where two Nobel Peace Prize winner’s live, pretty crazy considering they were less than ¼ of a mile from each other! The rest of the day was pretty chill and now we’re getting ready to leave for Pietermaritzburg! We leave the hotel tomorrow at 7 AM and fly to Durban then drive to our campus, African Enterprise (AE) conference center and home for the next 10 or so weeks! Thanks everyone for your continued prayers! Don’t forget to let me know how you are all doing through e-mails/comments!!!

God bless,

Kelsey

P.S. I'll probably post pictures once we get settled on campus, so get excited!!!!!