“How was Africa?” is a question that has left me conflicted, and I never know where to begin. Do I give them the answer they want to hear or the answer of how it was really was?
Over this Christmas break, I spent two weeks in Cape Town, South Africa on a service trip. This was my second trip through International Volunteer Headquarters, an affordable international service organization, and I was volunteering in the schools and daycare centers of the devastatingly poor township of Capricorn.
Townships like Capricorn are a place where drugs, crime, and gangs run rampant. In the townships, kids as young as the age of nine run drugs for gangs, sniffing glue and rubbing tik (a form of crystal methamphetamine) on their gums to get high, and where two-year-olds wander the streets with no one looking out for them.
Families live in small, one-roo
m shacks with aluminum siding for walls, no insulation, and no foundation. Due to such close-quarter living conditions, children living in these townships are exposed to everything: they see their father smoke tik and shoot heroin, they see their mothers drink themselves to a stupor, they see abusive relationships, and they see their parents copulate. The kids that grow up in these townships are forced to grow up sooner than they should, and because they emulate what they see at home, their background occasionally shows when they play.
Every morning, we would be picked up in a van that would take us fro
m our beach town volunteer home in Muizenberg and make the five-minute drive to the townships. As the van would rumble down the dirt roads, the kids would run after it, chasing it down and waving it on.
Stepping out of the van and into Sunrise Daycare Center, the other volunteers and I would be swarmed by kids as they climbed on our backs and wanted to play games. What these kids want is quite simple: they crave the attention that every kid deserves and needs to grow.
That is why volunteers go to these places; because when we arrive at those schools and daycare centers, the hours spent with the kids allow them to just be kids playing games, making arts and crafts, singing songs, and dancing. Any hour they spend with us is an hour not spent being recruited by the gangs or wandering around the streets on their own.
After hours of hand game
s and piggy-back rides, we settled them down for lunch, which is likely the first meal they’d had that day. After lunch, our van would stop by and take us back to the volunteer house. The time outside of the townships were spent hiking mountain peaks, surfing on Muizenberg beach, bargaining at the local markets, and going on safaris.
During the one weekend I had in South Africa, I went on a three-day safari with some of the other volunteers. This was where I walked with lions, fed elephants at a sanctuary, went on a safari game drive, jumped off the world’s fourth-highest bungee jump at 700+ feet, and went shark-cage diving in Gansbaai Bay.
Nights were spent at two beautiful country-side hostels, sharing stories and getting to know the other volunteers. This is one of my favorite parts of international travel, when you get to meet people from all walks of life and different parts of the world. I met volunteers and travelers from Morocco, Japan, New Zealand, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil, just to name a few. From the United States, there were volunteers from San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, Boston, Chicago, and Nashville.
All of those volunteers came with the purpose of helping out the kids in any way they could, even if it was just to serve as positive role models in their lives. However, it wasn’t long until we found out that these kids inspired us just as much as we inspired them.
They taught us to live life simply, to find the joy in conditions where joy may be difficult to find. As you’d expect, it taught me to appreciate how blessed I am to grow up and receive an education in the United States.
That being said, the cross-cultural experience exposes how much of a bubble the United States can be. The people of SouthAfrica were warm and inviting, and their culture is rich and vibrant. I stepped off a plane into a country where I didn’t know a soul, and I boarded a return flight home with friendships and memories that will last a lifetime.
“So, how was Africa?”
Well, the best way I can put it is like this: I cried after my first day in the townships because of what I saw, and I cried on my last day because I didn’t want to leave.
