My Second Week in Cape Town!!!

Classes at UWC
So I am taking 5 classes at the University of Western Cape, two theology classes(Theology of Forgiveness and the Doctrine of Christ), an Ethics course, a Film course, and a Grassroots Leadership course. My first day of class was on Wed., after going through an insane line to drop and add classes because they change the class schedule on the first day, and I had my ethics course and the Doctrine of Christ class and they were both amazing! My ethics teacher was really cool, he looked like a guide for an African safari and was extremely smart. Plus the stuff we talked about in class was actually relevant to real life unlike Phil 50 ever was. Then my theology class was unbelievable. There were only 6 people and the teacher sat down and talked to us like he was a part of the class. Since the theology dept. at UWC is really small only people who are going to be priests or pastors or who are already pastors are taking theo. My entire class was pastors or in some kind of ministry. I cant imagine what I’m going to learn from them this semester! I’m so excited! Then on Thursday I had my first English/Film class. All we did was watch Shakespeare in Love. We get to watch movies every week, its going to be awesome! Friday I had the classes that are Marquette affiliated, Theology of Forgiveness and Grassroots Leadership. My grassroots class was boring, the teacher had a really annoying voice, but I think it will get better because we have a ton of really cool speakers that are going to be coming in. We did talk about how the free housing works around here and I couldn’t imagine living in a home in the township, my room is bigger than a home for 5 people. Next I had my Theology class and our teacher is awesome. He said that he is really concerned with our growth this semester instead of grades. He wants us to learn the material and learn how it pertains to us. We also have a lot of really awesome speakers coming into this class too. You guys will hear about them in later blogs.
Service Site
So for my service twice a week I work at an Engineering company called Shonaquip that produces wheelchairs. Renee and my project is really awesome, a bit challenging but something I think would really help us. We are going to be working on redesigning and building the redesign of a machine Shonaquip received from a company in the Netherlands. This machine is a seating simulator and it is used to make custom wheelchairs for people with extreme disabilities. How it works is… there are three bags that are filled with air and this bean bag like material. These are placed on a chair that cant be adjusted in many ways but changing the angles and lengths of the boards that make up the chair. Then a child with a disability is placed on the chair and adjusted while a foot pedal is used to suck the air out of the bags making them harder. When it is all done the bags are hard and contain a mold of the child sitting in an aligned position that could normally not be obtained in a regular wheel chair. Before the company used plaster to make a mold and then a reverse mold so as to make a wheelchair customized for the patent. Now the company has a program that can scan the mold into a computer and use another machine to cut that exact mold out of Styrofoam saving months worth of work, but they have never tried it before. Also with scanning the mold in they can do more than one mold per day and since a lot of people in the bush, that is the poorer part South Africa where people live in huts, do not have transportation to get to the company to get a mold of their wheelchair having a portable seating simulator that can scan in the mold will allow more access to the people of Africa. Renee and my job is to remake the machine so that can be produced totally in South Africa because it is extremely expensive to import the parts. We also need to modify the machine to make it lighter and compactable so that it can be placed into a van to go to the bush. Also with that we need to create a battery to operate the actuators and pump that can also be run on wall power or out of a car outlet. All of this will make the cost of customized wheelchairs cheaper, allowing more people access to wheelchairs.
2nd Party on Friday
So Friday night we decided to have people over, just a couple of friends and of course it turned into a crazy amount of people. However, it was really fun. There was a lot of dancing and I got to know a lot of local people. But the next day we got told by our supervisor that the neighbors said it was too loud and we can only have parties once a month. I’m ok with that, it’s hard watching after all those people.
District 6 Museum
District 6 is an area in Cape Town where thousands of blacks and colours were moved from their homes during the apartheid. The community was made out of a mixture of different kinds of people, but the apartheid government decided it would be better to have it be a whites only community (They claim that this had nothing to do with the fact that the location of the properties, you could see the ocean and the mountains from anyone’s doorstep, made them extremely valuable). However properties were never built due to the amount of time it took to demolish the old houses. The museum is there to remember what happen and to hopefully encourage the government to hurry up on rebuilding the homes for the people whose homes were taken from them, one about 200 have returned. Well when we went to the museum we had a tour guide who was from one of the oldest families displaced from District 6. He told us his story about how he watched he house get bulldozed from across the street, all his families personal items dumped into the ocean, and his family moved far out of the city into a coloured community. He also told us stories of other families and one was really moving… in one family the dad was coloured and the wife was black. They had three children which were considered black because the mom was black. Therefore when the apartheid government decided to displace the people of District 6, the dad was moved to a coloured township and the mom and children to a black township. To even see his wife, the husband needed to go to the police station and get permission to see her and even then he was only allowed to see her and the children for two hours every three months! I couldn’t believe it! I have only been here two weeks and talked to people from home multiple times, I couldn’t imagine not talking or seeing my family for three months and then only getting to see them for two hours.
Church
So Ashley, Renee, Robbie, and I went to this church I found in Obs called Jubilee. It is a nondenominational church made up of a diverse group of people, some English speaking, some Afrikaners and some Xhosa speaking people. It’s a huge congregation too, 1000 people! It was amazing though. We sang a song in Xhosa during worship and people where jumping and dancing around all through worship. I have never seen so much energy and excitement. After the sermon they had a visitors room where they feed us and gave us tea and coffee(something they do everywhere in Africa) and we got to know people. Then we found out that they were having a picnic for the college students that day but because of the weather, it was raining, they were having it in the church. So we stuck around and mingled. I meet a lot of really cool people, there was this one girl from Zimbabwe and she told me the story about how she came to South Africa and how life was in her country and how she didn’t go home during election times because “Its took scary, people get really into it”. If you know anything about Zimbabwe, there government has been run by the same guy for years and if anyone tries to run against him they end up dead. He has completely ruined their economy but they can’t get anyone else to take his place, but now there is this other guy who seems like he might actually be competition s its really interesting to see how the election turns out. Anyways we meet a lot of other people and learned about the life groups were are kinda like small groups in the states and I think Ashley and I are going to join one for college students. I will be nice to get to know other Christian our age here in Africa. In the end it was super fun, super moving (the guest speaker was phenomenal) and overall unbelievable. I can’t wait to go again.