Laura's learning lessons to last a lifetime

This week I started my new internship with Public Transport Voice in Khayelitsha. I really like it so far! They’re a very new organization, which means they need a lot of help getting off the ground, especially with writing manuals and their internal policies. I’m glad I can use my writing skills to help them develop their organization. On day one I got to go out into Khayelitsha and meet one of my supervisor’s friends. Unfortunately, I don’t remember his name. We had an amazing conversation about journalists and how they can improve society, instead of divide it. It helped me gain a new perspective on my possible profession.

This weekend, we attended Human Rights Weekend, which was thrown by an NGO called Africa Unite. I was really excited for it because it provided me with an opportunity to broaden my human rights knowledge. It was a mixture of UConn students and people from South Africa. Vincent, our professor, facilitated it. Overall, I really enjoyed it. We talked about human rights education and how we could use it to encourage change. It made me realize how little I do to prevent human rights violations from occurring.

As part of the weekend, we had to create a mock UN presentation based on a country we chose. Since I really don’t know much about current events in African countries, I let my group choose and we ended up with Nigeria. The goal of the presentation was to get two billion dollars to help our country. Putting that presentation together was probably the hardest part of the weekend, since we didn’t know each other at all. Watching all the other groups present was fun. However, I thought it was strange that we were “judged” on dressing up. To me, it felt like an example of cultural appropriation. That prompted an interesting discussion among us co-educators on cultural appropriation and how to prevent it from happening.

In the end, it was a very educational experience. I learned a lot about rights that refugees have, and how hard it is to become a refugee in certain countries. It also forced us to work with people we don’t know, and find compromises. It was a lot of hard work, but it’s concepts I will take with me for the rest of my life.