[feels like home].

so i will preface my blog to begin:
first of all.. this blog will contain the stories of my four days spent in gugulethu. i really do not wish to blog about this experience. do not get me wrong, i had a life changing week there.. but somehow.. i feel as though this blog will not do justice to the time i spent in gugulethu.

i can give you the stories.. but i cannot give you the experience.

so, i should start with how i felt going into our homestays. i think i mentioned the xenophobic violence that occurred in cape town, like right before we arrived here. immediately, that put a little extra tension on to my nervousness. however, it helped to meet my host mom that sunday at church prior to our stay. i was paired up with erin as my homestay sister, and our mama was noxie! she's a single woman.. well actually.. she has a boyfriend, but she lives in her house with her sister and nephew. she has the brightest smile and a big heart. first thing she did was wrap her arms around both erin and i. and we were called her "babies".

noxie had one son. she told us that he was 18 when he was murdered. her son was killed in a tragic case of mistaken identity. however, noxie told us that she forgave them.. like they actually came to apologize. i mean how do you forgive people who "accidentally" killed your son. a very hard situation i would like to believe.

anyways.. we spent the whole time at jl zwane community center just going along with people to homestays or volunteering with the kids of the rainbow program. and there was one situation that happened during one afternoon at the rainbow program. i went and hungout with the 4th graders. it actually was quite a lot of fun. i love working with kids so it was a treat to spend my afternoon with them. it was so refreshing because the kidsd were just so excited that you were there to spend time with them. they tried to teach me the native language of xhosa. xhosa involves clicking of the tongue as part of the language. very, very difficult. but extremely fun to learn! unfortunately, i still don't have the clicking down completely.. meh.. still working at it! but as we were sitting around talking, one of the boys told me he wished he was "colored". he said that i was very pretty, but he wished he was "colored" so he could date me. it seemed like it was the lingering aftershock of the apartheid in south africa. it was just a difficult comment to hear because i think it is extremely disheartening to actually witness, that these children are growing up with the notion that they are inferior due to the color of their skin. like he did not even give it a second thought saying that comment.. it was just a truth for him that his skin color wasn't good enough for people who aren't black.

this next story is really.. something i would like everyone to read. it is about a woman named prisicilla. prisicilla is a woman who has four children of her own. on top of that, she adopted two children.. and on top of that, she took in another family of five children. so that is a total of .. yup.. eleven children. a few are out of the house now, but still, she has at least seven in her care at the moment. however, like most of the houses in the township, her house in not completely finished. basically, priscilla spends all day worrying about what to feed these children and how to care for them. she goes around during the day to find little jobs to make money to feed the children. they don't even have basic things such as toilet paper or feminine products for the ladies of the household. i cannot imagine being a woman in this household, not having feminine products.. those are just basic things in my life. i cannot imagine worrying, daily, about what to eat or if i could eat. i don't know.. it was just a story that cracked me. i had tried the whole week, not to get emotional about everything that i was seeing. i felt like that being emotional implies that you are pitying these people.. and pitying people almost automatically implies that you are superior to these people. but that was not the train of thought that was working in my head. my heart honestly breaks for these people because they don't even have the basic needs... and here i go again with the word vomit.

in conclusion: haha.. if i can even put a conclusion on this experience.. it was amazing and life changing.. and honestly i will not be returning home the same girl that left minneapolis.