Rachele overcoming fears and enjoying a wide variety of activities.

This week I started taking my classes to get scuba certified! Scuba diving is always something I have wanted to do, but I found out this weekend that it goes against my fears much more than I expected. On Saturday I had my first dive in a swimming pool on a military base in Wynberg. Practicing breathing through the respirator made me anxious as I felt like I was not getting enough air. Once we were in the pool, the visibility was terrible and I had a hard time seeing my instructor Iain. This made me more anxious and had an even harder time breathing as we practiced exercises like losing our respirator and clearing it. But as I did these exercises more and more the breathing became much easier. I realized that the thought of scuba diving scared me more than I had initially thought, being underwater sometimes at points so deep you cannot just swim to the surface for air. However, it is something I would really like to accomplish and a fear I know I can overcome for the experience of a lifetime.

           

This weekend I also went to two vastly different concerts, Ultra and The Soil. Ultra was a fun EDM music festival at Cape Town Stadium, but it was pretty pricy so I noticed a lot of the people at the concert were tourists. The Soil however was a summer concert at Kirstenbosch where the tickets were about R165. This concert I noticed had a lot of Xhosa speaking people because a lot of The Soil’s music was in Xhosa. This reminded me of the Church Service we went to where the service was mainly in Xhosa, but we didn’t need to understand the language to know the feeling. Same thing with the Soil, even though I did not understand all of their lyrics I could appreciate the music and see how the people around me were reacting.

This week at the aquarium we had a kind of drinking social the aquarium hosts once a month to let the people working there relax and hangout outside of work. One of the things that came up in conversation was corruption with policing here, particularly in Johannesburg. What I heard was that a lot of times police officers will take money instead of writing a ticket, or in extreme cases demand that money be paid directly to them rather than writing a ticket. A lot of people in Cape Town have come from Johannesburg and this makes me interested in seeing why people have chosen Cape Town over Johannesburg. I am interested to go and be able to compare what seem like two very different cities both in South Africa.

This weekend we have the homestay and I am very excited for that! I have the expectation of being more involved in a community. I love being at Two Oceans but I think some people with internships in a smaller community have the experience of meeting more people first hand and getting to know a community of people very well. I also hope for the homestay weekend I get to interact with some children in the area! There’s kids at the aquarium all the time that I don’t really interact with too much so I would love the chance to do that this weekend.