Youth for Understanding South Africa International Youth Exchange
Astrid Hansen, Denmark For me the highlights on the tour were the arrival to Jeffrey’s Bay, where the beach “greeted us” with wide, nearly deserted and pale shores. It was an amazing experience which is highly comparable with “dreamland”. We were all just jumping around and taking pictures . The other highlight was actually one of the last days in Cape Town, where a small group of the students decided to go to Robben Island. It is so hilarious to think back on all the Capetownians and other tourists faces, as we were running down to the ferry through the whole city/harbour just to find out, that we didn’t make it. The ferry left without us, so we got to spend one or two hours more walking between the shops seeing people shaking their heads as we exhausted came back after an intense run for nothing.
Youth For Understanding South Africa Newsletter January 2011
A big thanks to YFU SA for planning the tour! Rynette Scholtz and Stefanie cuddling the baby rhino
“SEEMS LIKE MY PURPOSE IN LIFE…” One of the typical questions I had to answer time and time again after I returned from my three-month-internship for YFU in Pretoria: “Was it a lot of work?” And I just replied: “Work? No, I didn’t really see it like that. It was more like – well – life.” Of course there were those days during the orientation, when I had no idea how to get up in the morning, because no one had felt like going to bed the night before.
Or those moments in the office, when some problem just refused to be fixed and I couldn’t keep track of all those worried emails from a student’s parents or some other YFU office. And how I would have hated these moments of my internship, if there hadn’t always been wonderful people around to give me a hint here and there, to come to my aid, and to cheer me up again with their endless optimism. There is Rynette, of course, the most wonderful YFU coordinator I have ever met, and so much more to me than just someone I worked for and lived with. Besides from giving me the chance to visit my host family again, she also gave me a home
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