Hello again from Cape Town! I’ve had an unbelievable first week in this great city. I left off my last post in anticipation of my internship experience. Before I get to that, however, I also have another important part of my experience I’d like to mention. Each Monday I will be taking a class in contemporary South African issues. This past Monday was my first class and it was very interesting. So far we have talked a lot about the many tools of apartheid and racialized oppression in South Africa. We discussed the imposition of language as a method of suppressing subordinate culture and especially how geography and infrastructure can create material inequalities that lock people into poverty and social disenfranchisement (one of the unequal scenes we looked at is pictured below). Our readings this week were about these topics and more, including colonialism and the complexities of international aid and development, which has been very interesting.

An Unequal Scene by Imizamo Yethu (Hout Bay, South Africa)

Tuesday was the first day of my internship. It was not exactly what I had expected. Beyond Expectation Environmental Project (BEEP) is in Philippi, a township outside of Cape Town. You can Google Philippi to get a better understanding of what I mean. Basically it is a slum, as are the other townships of the Western Cape. Most of the homes, restaurants, businesses, etc. are composed of pieces of tin stitched together to form small shacks of one or two rooms. There are rabid dogs everywhere and trash litters the streets. From my privileged position, this is abject poverty of the likes I have never seen. As I am increasingly learning however, these communities are actually comparatively better off than many others throughout Africa, and even in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, just kilometers away. The townships of the Western Cape mostly have running water, electricity and usually enough food to survive. Some of the homes even have television, even though most don’t have their own bathrooms. Either way, this township is unlike any place I have spent a significant amount of time, and it is where I will be spending the majority of my weekdays over the next two months.

The people that I will be working with are very amazing. Mama K is the number 2 at BEEP and she is very fun and talkative and such an inspiring person who cares so much about all of the kids. Two other people we will be working with are Ohlwethu and Nomvuyo, both previous participants in the BEEP program who have gone through the ranks to now become employees. They are both so passionate about helping the kids and are very committed to the organization. Finally, Lindela. Lindela is the director of BEEP. He started it more than 10 years ago with the dream of empowering township kids to become community leaders, advocates and model citizens through bringing them to Table Mountain and teaching them about the environment. He is a quiet person, but he cares so much about these kids and wants to do whatever he can to help them. Lindela is also interesting in that he has many unconventional methods of building leadership and presentation skills which usually include throwing anyone and everyone into situations that they are certainly not prepared for in order to teach adaptability, flexibility and confidence. All of these people are so inspiring in their care for and commitment to the communities from which they have come. Another random, interesting note about the BEEP staff, and the township in general, is that they all speak Xhosa as their first language. Xhosa is one of the clicking languages and I have begun to learn some of it as they speak it throughout the day.

Lindela Mjenxane, Director of BEEP

Within minutes of arriving at BEEP, my worries from the previous post had vanished. We will be working with the kids, going on hikes and much more. I will also have an opportunity to do the research I want to do, which is very exciting. While I will save much of the specifics of what I will be doing for future posts, I will talk about some of the things I have already done with BEEP. The first day we went around to many of the schools to meet the principals and see the flower and food gardens that BEEP manages. The first afternoon we met Lindela, who told us in our first conversation that on our second day we would be responsible for running a meeting between BEEP and a local member of the Signal Hill Rotary Club. Like I said before, Lindela likes to throw people into situations and see what happens. We finished our first day by going to a workshop that some of the student leaders were running with the kids. They were reviewing what they had learned about pollution and climate change and gave presentations on what they had learned in front of the entire class.

On our second day we spent much of the morning reading books about social issues in the township. We will be using these to run book clubs in the next couple weeks. After that we went to the mall and then had lunch. At around 2, we finally went to the meeting with the Rotarian. Paige (the other girl working with BEEP from Kentucky) and I did well! We each contributed a lot to the conversation and helped support BEEPs goals moving forward with the Rotary Club. Lindela was very impressed. He even told us so, which the other BEEP employees said is extremely rare. On our last two days this week we spent a lot of time going to schools and figuring out logistics for the next few weeks. We also went to Driftsands, a nature preserve, to meet with our partner there. BEEP regularly takes their kids to Driftsands to watch videos about some of the harder-to-explain topics. We also went twice to a restaurant in the township for lunch to get local food (pictured below). The cooks were kind enough to prepare a vegetarian platter for me (I don’t eat meat) even though it wasn’t on the menu. I am extremely glad to say that not only did this food not make me sick, it was also extremely delicious.

Next I wanted to touch briefly on my research. As I said, I will be able to do it. I spent a lot of time this week crafting questions and thinking about how I want to do conduct my research. One of my assignments this summer will be to create a booklet for BEEP to train future student leaders on how to best present content and lead workshops. To do this I will have to interview the student leaders to understand which practices are best for this environment. Fortunately, these interviews provide a perfect opportunity to include some of my own research questions, which the people at BEEP are totally OK with. I hope to interview both the student leaders and some South African climate activists and write an analysis of climate activism in South Africa and how public education and environmental education NGOs work to either help or harm the climate movement in South Africa. I am so excited to do these interviews and see what I learn from them.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the other activities I did this week. On Thursday night we went to a local night market where there was tons of good food and drinks and desserts. I had Bunny Chow for the first time (pictured above) which is an amazing Indian curry inside a hollow half of a loaf of bread. I also had some really good empanadas, brownies and ice cream. Saturday we went to Kirstenbosch, which is also something worth Googling. Kirstenbosch is one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of botanical gardens in all of Africa. There were so many amazing flowers and unbelievable views here. We even took a detour to go on part of one of the many hikes that stem from Kirstenbosch. Some of the pictures from this trip are below, including a few from the meal we had at the restaurant within Kirstenbosch, which I highly recommend.  I mostly stayed behind the camera for this one, but Kendall is featured in many of the pictures. All in all, this has truly been one of the greatest (if not the greatest) weeks of my life. I am so happy to be in Cape Town, and right now, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Scroll Below to see pictures of Kirstenbosch