Day 1 and 2

Hey everyone. So I am finally in Jo-burg, South Africa. I will go through the details of my first 2 days. So starting Saturday afternoon, I arrived at the airport. My bag was overweight by like 3 pounds so I just had move some stuff into a new bag. Besides that, no other problems arose. Got through security and meet 2 other people going on my trip there. We found our gate and started to find other people going on the trip too emerging as their flights began to land. We all sat and made small talk for 2 hours, waiting to broad our 17 hour flight. Finally around 5 we boarded the plane and found that we all were sitting next to each other, which was awesome. I then learned that we were stopping in Dakar, Senegal, which was 6 hours and 45 minutes away. We landed in Senegal, though I wish we were allowed to exit the plane to see it but that didnt happen. I only got to be in Airport Senegal. So then we had to wait another hour before we could take off to Jo-burg, South Africa. Jo-burg is about 10 hours from Dakar, making the trip feel like it was never gonna end.


After falling asleep and waking up every hour and watching movies, we were finally near Jo-burg. There was a 20 minute stretch where there was no clouds so you could see how vast Africa really is and how compacted the houses are where there are houses. Finally we landed and we all shuffled to immigration. That was pretty much a breeze, same with all of us finding our luggage. After we all collected our stuff, we met up with 5 people leading our program. They introduced themselves and then let us go find ATMs and currency exchange places to go to get some rands, which is the South African currency. After that, we all loaded into 2 vans, about 11 in each with all of our stuff packed in trailers connected to our vans. We got to St. Peters Place, the guesthouse we are staying in while we are in South Africa. It is nice little place and we are all in rooms with 2 or 3 people as well. We had a quick dinner and then had a little meet and greet or icebreaker, if you will. Then we got our schedule for the week and a reader with articles related to places we are going to visit in Jo-burg. From there, we all went our separate ways and find wireless internet to check our emails and such. I tried to go to sleep at a reasonable time like 10:30 but I just could not sleep last night. I think I got about 2 hours of sleep all together. It was raining all night long and there were many lightning strikes as well. Apparently Jo-burg is the city with the most lightning, which is very interesting.

Day 2
We woke up around 730 and had breakfast at 8. We then went to our orientation into the program. We just went over health and safety information and our schedule for Jo-burg in more detail. Then we had our first speaker of our trip. Mr. Mataboge was his name but we was referred to as Molfolee (spelling is definitely wrong here). He came to talk to us about the Liberation Struggle in South Africa. He is from SOWETO, which actually stands for South West Townships. There are 34 townships within Soweto with about 5 million people but no one knows for sure how many people live there. He gave us a condensed version of the history of South Africa starting at 1652, which is when the first White person came to South Africa so that is the date that was put into history books as the beginning of South Africa's history. It was a very interesting talk to here. I had learned a little bit about the Soweto riots in 1976 at Clark but what he spoke about just blew my mind.

After hearing from our speaker, he took our group on a tour around Soweto. We stopped in many different locations. The first place we stopped was the Old Single Quarters. This is an area where very rich black South Africans live. The houses had huge security systems surrounding them and yards were very landscape. We stopped at a location where you could see both where the rich Black South Africans live and where the poor live. The poor houses we saw were ones of miners who came to Jo-burg for work and had left their wives and families behind. Each house housed about 5-10 men. They built two-story houses on the other side of this long road that are meant for the miners to move in with their families but the problem is the cost of the house so many cannot move into them anyways. It was really interesting to see the contrast between the two living areas.

The next stop was the Regina Mundi Church, which happens to be in the Rockville township, which is a cool fact. This is a church that was stormed during the Soweto riots. The police shot guns at the students inside the church from both inside and outside the church. We had this really interesting tour guide who explained every little detail about the church to us. They started to rehab the church but they left so places that show what happened at the church in 1976. There are still bullet holes in the ceiling and tables still cracked. Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton have also been the church many times so of course the tour guide told us that.

Our next stop was at the Morris Isaacson School, which is the main school where the students participating in the protest came together. The school is on a main road that the students walked down during the protest. Off this road is the Hector Peterson Museum. Hector Peterson was the first person killed during the 1976 riots. The Museum is now where Hector's house was during 1976. His sister, Antoinette came to talk to us in the museum. Her story was just sensational. It was amazing to hear her to tell the story of what happened that day her brother was killed. Many of you may have seen the famous picture of a guy holding Hector Peterson and a woman next to them, well that woman was the one who talk to us. After that we had time look around the museum. It was just crazy to see what happened during this period of time. 

Our next stop, which was just down the street was Nelson Mandela's house that he lived in before he went to jail. The original house was actual set on fire but much of it still remains. It was a pretty small house but no less interesting. It had about 3 rooms. One room was Nelson's and his wife and another room which was the kitchen and bathroom and the last room was his kids room. All of his kids umbilical cords are buried in the backyard too. Haha.

Our last stop was Soccer City, which is one of the main stadiums used during the World Cup. Now it is used for when the two Soweto soccer teams play each other because it draws in a big crowd. This stadium was huge and of many colors.

This day was very very busy. We experienced a lot of Jo-burg and specifically Soweto. It was really mind blowing and I finally felt that I was truly in Africa.