We’re Home! And yet, not quite…

“We are not African because we live in Africa. We are African because Africa lives in us.” –motto of Afrovibe Adventure Lodge.

AFROVIBE

 

The 2015 South Central College student trip to South Africa has come to an end. When we returned and settled back into our lives in Minnesota this past week, we realized our trip hasn’t really ended. Yes, we’ve come home, but we carry Africa with us. Our journey was far more than a sight-seeing trip, and certainly not just a vacation. We were immersed in the culture, we met people, we went into Township homes, we spent hours with South African college students who became our friends. We experienced not only the incredibly beautiful country and wildlife; we lived in South Africa for two weeks of our lives. Yes, Afrovibe is right. Africa lives in each of us.

(And no, thank you for asking, none of us got mauled by lions).

There’s so much I want to say, so much I want to show the world about what we learned and experienced. I want to stuff it all into one post and hit “publish”! But I can’t. It’s too much, too big.

So, I’m going to write about the trip day by day, and submit a bit at a time. Mandela Art at Capture Site

ALSO, Robb Murry just agreed to publish a piece about the student trip in the September issue of the Mankato Magazine. I’ll take pieces from here and from Facebook, and blend it into one concentrated story. Stay tuned! (I’m excited).

First of all, I want to send a HUGE thank you to Earthstompers Adventures for arranging our itinerary, accommodations, and booking our museums and sight-seeing. I gave them a budget, and they made it work. We got to do EVERYTHING we truly wanted to in South Africa. I can’t say enough about what a wonderful job they do for us. Pieter Wolhuter, our Earthstompers guide, is a history buff so he had wonderful info and anecdotes to contribute. He was also tons of FUN! “Buckle up, boys and girls, Daddy’s gonna drive!”

Pieter and me CangoThis is Pieter and me…outside Cango Caves, while some students were spelunking. (By the way, Pieter is five days younger than my son Josh, and traveler Mike Dokken was born the same week as well).

So all this begs the question, why South Africa?

This all began a few years ago at Joe Tougas’s 50th birthday party when Scott Fee asked me, “Becky, would you ever consider taking South Central students to South Africa?”

“Yes!” was out of my mouth before Scott had closed his. Now I’ve been to South Africa three times, twice with student groups.

I fell in love with South Africa twenty years ago, before I’d ever been on the African continent, when I read Bryce Courtenay’s book, The Power of One. I can’t recommend that epic novel enough–it’s an introduction to South Africa in the first half of the 1900s. It was the favorite of most of my class this year, and one of my all-time five favorite books.  London, ZA here we come

Besides that, I discovered that studying South Africa can be a metaphor for the world; if we understand what has happened there at a heart-level, we can translate that to most any conflict in the world. It can change our world view, and our view of how we want to interact with everybody we meet.

Here is my travel crew–this was at Heathrow Airport in London on the way to Africa. We are bubbling with excitement. And I can safely say…these are the people in whom Africa lives.

I’ll introduce the travelers:

Faces, left to right: me, Meri Molina, Andrea Krueger, Amanda Niebuhr, Mike Dokken, Kelsey Paaj Lugo, Paul Dobratz,Micayla Mann, and Kandi Heenan. Dr. Brant Barr joined us on Johannesburg, too. He was quickly nick-named Grandpa Chook, which came directly from The Power of one. More on all of our interactions soon!

This was not an easy trip. The pace was fast, and our emotional roller coaster was intense. We went…from an impoverished township where all shops and beauty salons were housed in shipping containers, to a township preschool bubbling with hope and music, to a lion reserve, to a safari, to a self-sustaining artist colony in a township, to two vibrant backpacker hostels on the coast, to a drumming circle where we sat alongside South African college students who grew up in poverty and welcomed us as new and dear friends, to Mandela’s home village, to Steve Biko’s grave, to a penguin colony, to the southern point of Africa where we stood with one foot in each of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, to the spectacular view from Table Mountain above Cape Town, to the prison on Robben Island where Mandela was held for eighteen of his twenty-seven-year incarceration. Robben Island we visited on our last afternoon in South Africa, and it was truly a finale in every way. Suffice it to say that each of us is changed from living for two weeks immersed in South Africa.

So, stay tuned for stories. I’ll try to cover most of these in separate, shorter posts.

Becky Avatar

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