Adjusting to Happiness

It is day four in Cape Town. What a whirlwind! I feel as if I have lived here for weeks. I shall try to keep this brief for sake of readability. We registered for classes at the University of the Western Cape on Wednesday which, now that it is over, was not as stressful a process as I had imagined. We also had orientation yesterday, which, besides being long, was really great. It was so strange to be a foreign student at the university. The campus is beautiful and I cannot wait to interact with the students in my classes. There was a very good presentation given by (I think it was) the Chancellor of the university. He was very optimistic and had a lot of hope for our generation to change the world in a positive way.

I have gone twice now into the townships to visit service sites. That is by far going to be the most life-giving part about this semester. The townships are these vast neighborhoods of one room tin houses. I was struck by the permanency of the situation when we drove on the paved roads through the neighborhood. I have not been permanently placed at a site, but I think I may end up at an primary school with one thousand "learners" they call them. The teacher who showed us around was very realistic in terms of the situation the neighborhoods were in and seemed to encourage the community to come together to better their own situation.

There is much more to say, but for now I am very happy to have the whole group here and it's starting to feel like home.