CIEE keeps us busy almost every second of the day. On yesterday’s agenda, we listened to speakers come in and talk about volunteer opportunities in Cape Town. There were two programs that stood out to me the most, one was a program called CHOSA. CHOSA is the program that I would stick with to help my career as a teacher, and it allows you to create a lesson plan to teach kids English and also mathematics. CHOSA requires creativity and a heart for kids, which I believe I have, but if I stuck with where my heart really wants to lead me, I am probably going to end up at a different program at a place called The Arc. Now the Arc has many different services from spending time with kids, feeding the homeless, helping addicted drug addicts become clean, and even adopting a project of our very own to help out The Arc.

After learning about the volunteer projects we finally got to find out about housing for the semester! I am in a house called Nursery, named after the street that it’s on. Now my friend Hannah and I went to Nursery street to try to find our house, because we don’t officially get to see it until Saturday. If I am correct, it’s a three story brick house and looks pretty great. Nursery street is thankfully right near campus so it will be so easy to hop on a Jammie to campus within a matter of minutes. A Jammie is a shuttle program that is for UCT students to get around campus, which by the way, is absolutely huge. There are supposed to be 16 students in our house, 4 boys and the rest girls. Our RA’s name is Jesse and he seems like such fun I am really looking forward to where this semester will bring all of us in the house. Also, one of my closest friends here Hannah, will also be in the house and I am looking forward to it so much!

After going over house rules, we then played the game…the AMA “zing”! race. Pronounced in the South African style ☺ It was one of the longest days by far due to the amount of walking around campus, getting lost, and eventually finding our way back to Graca Michel (named after Nelson Mandela’s wife, it’s one of the dorms we are staying in) for a braii (brabeque) and eventually some sleep. Campus was more massive and more beautiful then I could have ever imagined. We must have hiked for miles and miles just finding our way to different buildings in order to receive a clue, that would lead us to the next place we had to go. Our team didn’t win to say the least, we actually came in third to last and it was probably a 4 to 5 hour race spent maneuvering our ways around the beautiful ivy covered walls and hundreds of stairs. Eventually we got to the last clue, overjoyed and exhausted we made our journey to the braii where we all ate chicken and ribs, and I managed to fall into the best night of sleep I’ve had yet!