Sam: educational fun on the Human Rights Weekend

 This weekend we got a chance to get away from the house for a few days and venture to an olive farm about an hour away with a name that I can’t pronounce. We weren’t given many details about what was in store for us and honestly I was a little skeptical about having to go to the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people I didn’t know and then having to do a workshop with them all weekend. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by the whole experience. I met some really awesome people and made some great new friends who I am hoping to keep in touch with in the future. The olive farm was absolutely beautiful, although not having Table Mountain right out my window was a little disorienting at times. I also learned so much not just about human rights but about communication and about different countries in Africa since we had such a diverse group from places such as Congo, Mozambique, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and even South Africa. It was really fun getting to know everyone there and hearing about their own life experiences and the work they are doing themselves to educate others and better the communities they are from.

           

Samantha (second from left)

We all split into four groups and were able to pick a country to research and present on to win a $500 billion check from the World Bank. Saturday night all the groups presented facts about their country and what they would do with the money and it was really fun getting to know about a country. My group chose Egypt and I didn’t know as much as I had hoped about the revolution and political unrest that is still going on there. Learning about it just made me want to know more about other countries and made me want to be more aware of world events. Its something I’ll have to work on. Some of the other exercises we did taught us about the difficulties of being a refugee or asylum seeker and the whole process they have to go to just to seek protection from their own government. I wasn’t as familiar with the terms such as the difference between an asylum seeker and refugee (an asylum seeker hasn’t been granted full protection yet, while a refugee’s case has already been heard and approved), I also learned about the rights of refugees. We of course also spoke about what human rights are and the different categories and I learned more than I could possibly explain in one blog post.

           

The best part was just getting to interact with the other people there. I made so many new friends and had some great conversations about life and how others live. Saturday night after we were done with the structured activities for the day, a bunch of us walked up to the dam that is on the farm. There is a dock there that we laid on and just looked at the stars for hours. This is one of my favorite activities so I was totally happy and serene. This also lead to discussions about life and what’s beyond the stars and what we all believe. It was in its own way one of my favorite nights so far, and seeing seven shooting stars definitely didn’t hurt. I like that being here I can see different stars than I can at home too. I have always been fascinated by stars and space so I was thoroughly entertained for hours. One of the guys there named Ryan knew a lot about astronomy so I liked talking to and learning from him the whole time.

           

The weekend was just amazing. It was nice to get away from Loch road for a weekend while getting to know new people and connecting more with the people I’ve been living with for over a month. Plus they had amazing food the whole weekend with their delicious homemade salad dressings. Now I’m back to cooking simple meals for myself but I will definitely be keeping in contact with many of the people I met this weekend and we will hopefully be able to organize human rights training around Cape Town to use some of the information we all learned from our short time together.