Today marks the end of the first week of classes! We did not begin service this week so it was a relatively free week which was good as we adjusted to the University of Pretoria. Besides the fact that the campus and student body is WAY bigger than Fordham and many of us have never taken a class in a lecture hall with 100+ people there were many quirks to adapt to. For instance, each building has a different ground floor number (the humanities building is the 3rd floor and the IT building is the 2nd floor) and the classes do not follow as straight forward of a block schedule as Fordham (one of my classes meets Monday/Wednesday and the other Monday/Thursday, each meeting is at a different time, and one of my classes meets in different lecture halls on different days). Finally, I had to ask what the "tutorial" part of my anthropology class was and once I learned that it was a discussion, I was left wondering how that could be possible in a 100 person class in a lecture hall. Come Wednesday, I learned that it was possible and I even felt comfortable enough to participate! The two UP classes I am taking are International Political Economy and Anthropological Perspectives on Africa. I wanted to take these classes because I thought they would give a different perspective than the classes I take in the US (they also count towards my major but thats just a bonus). So far they have not disappointed! In anthropology we discussed rebelling against the Western approach to describing cultures in a much more serious and honest way than it would have been approached in the US. In IPE, the professor went over the most pressing risks of 2018 as outlined by the World Economic Forum by using examples in South Africa and the African continent with only a few mentions of the US. This was such a refreshing change from my International Politics class at Fordham last semester in which, although I learned a lot, we dedicated significant time to picking apart the actions of President Trump. On Friday, we had class as a group from 8:30am to 4:00pm with an hour break for lunch so it was a tiring day but will be our new normal. We began our Poverty and Community Development class by deciding where we would be doing our community site work. After some compromise and a lot of coordination, we landed on a weekly schedule; I will be at Soshanguve Secondary School and after school program all day on Tuesday and hopefully for a half day on Wednesday! Next up was small group reflection with Annmarie from the Jesuit Institute to help us process all of our new experiences. We finished out the day with a jam packed South African history lesson from Dr. Egan to kick off our Modern South African Stories class. Starting classes was an important step in settling into the routine of the next five months and feeling at home here. Although I still have moments where I think to myself "Wait, I'm in South Africa!!"
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