15 Hours and counting.

In 15 hours I depart for Cape Town, South Africa. My stay there will be relatively short (2.5 months) but to better keep in contact with friends and family I have created this blog. I will update it periodically with goings-on, photos, and descriptions of life in Cape Town as well as my internship.

The reason for my trip to South Africa is to gain some field/work experience in the form of an internship at the Cape Town Refugee Centre. To me, this is the dream internship. I spent 5 stressful, wonderful, amazing, hard, and worthwhile months living in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. While I was there I lived among a refugee population of millions. It was there that I saw the Israel-Palestinian conflict from three very different angles: the Jordanians, forced to take in and support their brothers who remain a people apart, the Palestinians, struggling between assimilation and seemingly hopeless nationalism, and finally the Israelis, playing both bully and victim yet still facing a very real security threat everyday. This fascinated me during my stay and surprisingly stayed with me as I returned to my senior year at WWU.

In February as I pondered my entrance in the "real world", this internship fell into my lap. Working with refugees was the dominating factor in why I chose this particular internship over others in different locations offered by the same program. I will admit that the other options apart from any internship I had been considering were joining the Sea Shepard crew aboard the Steve Irwin as documented on the television show Whale Wars, or flying to Israel to join ICAHD and protest house demolitions in the West Bank. This would most likely be achieved by chaining myself to said homes. Working at the Refugee Centre appeared to be the sanest choice and here I sit counting down the hours until my flight departs!

I'll try to best describe life in Cape Town but if there is anything you'd like to know, please leave me a comment and I'll answer it if I can. If you're searching for more information on my home country for the next few months the CIA world factbook gives some pretty black and white information on it.