First Impressions

At the two-week mark of my time in South Africa, I’m still working on my first impression of the country. I have spent the past days throwing my pre-conceived notions out the window and developing a first look at the country.

What I have found is a paradoxical nation – one filled with conflicting aspects that are confusing, yet make sense considering South African history.

The first dichotomy is that of the natural environment. There are gorgeous national parks and diverse wildlife, yet the waste-managementsystem is underdeveloped and inefficient. My firstweekend here CIEE took our group on an overnight in Table Mountain National Park. The setting was picturesque: the rolling hills covered in shrubs went on forever, only to meet the mountains on one side and the Atlantic on the other. The land was magnificent and untouched. We drove past zebras and bucks living together in harmony – it was straight out of a movie.

Yet as I saw more of Stellenbosch and spoke to the assistant director of the program, I learned that much of the land is littered with garbage and ruined by landfills. Many of us have this view of Africa as an untouched land where the people live a life free from materialism and industrialization. Yet almost nobody recycles in South Africa, and the Stellenbosch area landfill is nearly full. So although much of the land is pristine and protected, the developed areas are as dirty, if not dirtier than cities in the U.S. This surprised me, but I’m not sure why. I should have expected the cities to be dirty, and the new government to still be working out an efficient and complete system for maintaining the land.

Another dichotomy I have noticed is that of the Stellenbosch area, and the legacy apartheid has left there. When choosing a study abroad site, I was drawn both to the beauty of the Stellenbosch winelands, and the opportunity the Learning Service program would give me to see the “real South Africa.” My time at Lyndoch primary has shown me how much greater the gap between the rich and the poor is here in South Africa, and how distinctly parallel race and economic lines are. It has always frustrated me that many people rush to help those starving in Africa when poverty is very real for many in the U.S., yet the definition of poverty in Africa is very different from that in the U.S. In New Jersey, Abbott districts receive more state funding than wealthier areas in an attempt to even the playing field. However, the system appears to be quite different in the Western Cape region. I don’t claim to be an expert, but from what I understand, the state funding for public schools is insufficient. In 1994, Lynedoch was the second-worst primary school in the Western Cape, and received only 150,000 rand (roughly $20,000) to help improve the school. I don’t mean to be harsh on the South African country, especially considering the new government and rule has barely been established, but these were insufficient funds to help a struggling school in an impoverished area. With the financial backing of the progressive Spier wine estate, however, Lynedoch has become a model for rural area primary schools in the region. The school still struggles to find the resources to maintain a school in the 21^st century, though, and still lacks certain things like computers that are commonplace in schools in America. Additionally, most of the Stellenbosch area wine farms are not as philanthropic as the Spier Estate and the region has a long way to come. So although on paper the Rainbow Nation is one of equality, the reality is far from that.