Today brought about a wide range of thoughts for me. It started off with the lecture and when we were talking about how much of an impact apartheid still has today I was sort slapped back into reality. When I’m walking the streets I don’t see shooting or burnings or things that occurred during apartheid so much like things from our history I feel like they happened hundreds or years ago, but it was only 16 years ago. I realized what I already knew; it’s not that old. Alan was telling us about how he didn’t go to a restaurant for the first time until he was in his twenties. We then were awakened to the impacts that can still be seen today and I was almost sort of ashamed of myself for not knowing this was going on in the world while I was alive. You can argue that I was just an infant -4 years old when most of the changes were happening, but a lot of things happen during the process of changing that I didn’t know about either. To be absolutely honest I barely knew a thing about apartheid or Mandela before I got accepted into this study abroad and I was overcome with a range of emotions when we were talking about it today.
Bringing us all into laughter was listing to each other try and master the three click sounds made during our isiXosha language lesson. I absolutely love to learn new languages, but usually my struggle is in speaking and not so much in reading. For this particular language I’m struggling a little bit with both. It’s because when I’m trying to pronounce a word like Ndi the n is silent. A lot of letters tend to be silent when they are at the begging of words and my mind for whatever reason doesn’t want to wrap around that.
