Thus far my internship with the Student Movement for Real Change (SMRC) has been the experience of a lifetime. My internship began about 3 weeks ago in Washington, D.C. where I assisted the Executive Director with final preparations for the summer project that we have worked on together for the past year. Students for Students 2007 was created to uplift the rural communities in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. There are 18 U.S. students here, including 3 staff members. We spent the first week in meetings in Cape Town and Johannesburg with political officials including the Consulate General, Helen La Lime, and Special Advisor to the Ministor of Housing, Saths Moodley, and arrived to the village this past Saturday. As Project Director I worked extensively on coordinating the project's logistics with the SMRC contacts on the ground in South Africa and designing the project's structure in the three villages.
Although the whole group is living in homestays in Utha Village, we are split into three working groups in separate villages. Each group is responsible for organizing, creating, and managing their own two week Experiential Education "Camp" and assisting the South African youth with service projects to benefit the community. Our second two weeks in the villages we will work with teachers and offer separate English lessons as well as some entrepreneurial education. As a team leader I manage my group at Sampson Primary School in Makrepeni Village everyday by ensuring camp runs smoothly. With over 100 kids who barely speak English, it has been a little chaotic the first few days.
We spent our first day completing a "community assessment" of sorts whereby we walked around in several groups with translators and spoke with families about what they believe their greatest needs to be and also recorded some demographics. The majority of families in Makrepeni have to walk 2 or 3 miles to access a water tap in another village (that does not work all the time) and the nearest health clinic is a four hour walk. Unemployment is also a major problem. Although some people said they had no needs and were quite happy, the highest complaint regarded the clinic and the unemployment situation which is incredibly high in this part of the country.
We spend mornings with students from ages 4-14 and the afternoons with the older youth (between 15-20) that come to participate in small roundtable discussions with us. The activities we deployed have been fun and educational and we feel we have actually engaged the students, which can be quite difficult considering the language barrier and many other challenges. Our discussion with the older youth has been the most informative part. The groups are finally opening up to us about serious problems in the community with HIV/AIDS, infidelity, sexual violence, unemployment, lack of motivation to attend school and many other issues. It is exciting to work with them to conquer these issues.