Hi Allie!

 

Hi Ashley.

 

Welcome to Not Your Mom’s Travel Guide, a podcast exploring traveler’s guilt. Allie is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan. She majored in Biology, Health, and Society and is actually heading off to the University of Pennsylvania’s Dental School next semester so congratulations on that!

 

Thanks, Shley!

 

But during her junior year of undergrad, Allie wasn’t at Michigan. She actually studied in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. So, Allie can you tell us a little bit about your experience living and studying there to start us off?

 

Of course. So, I was there last year from January to June. So I got to escape the Michigan winter.

 

Thank god.

 

Which was really, really nice.  I got there at the peak of summer. I did not directly do an exchange program with the University of Cape Town. I went through a program called CIEE and the majority of the other students on my program, there were about 80 of us, were Americans but there were a couple, maybe 10 international students.

 

And international like from Europe or…?

 

From Europe.

 

Not from around Africa itself?

 

We had a boy from New Zealand and a girl from Australia, but the majority of us were throughout the U.S. And before we went we got to rank our preferences of where we wanted to live. The people who really wanted to, you know, immerse themselves did homestays but there were not many people who opted for the homestay option.

 

Which is pretty typical for college students not to opt for homestays.

 

Totally typical. One of the things that really kind of threw me off from it was you could be up to an hour away from school having to take transportation to school every day I thought would be difficult.

Yeah, so that was definitely a factor. 

 

The other options were to live in a University of Cape Town dorm with other University of Cape Town students. The people who did that really did like it. And then, the majority of us lived in a CIEE-owned apartment building with each other and we were randomly assigned roommates within the program. 

 

Gotcha. And the option that you chose?

 

So I did that last option like most of the other people. It was really fun. I lived with five other girls, met a lot of really great people and our apartment building was less than 10 minutes to class. 

 

That’s amazing.

It was in a somewhat safe area, as safe as it could have gotten. And there were restaurants nearby. I could walk to the grocery store. It was very convenient. 

 

Gotcha. And did you participate in any activities outside of just going to school and hanging out with study abroad students that you met through the program?

 

So, I joined the UCT Surf Club.

 

Adventurous!

 

And there are sharks in the way so, you know, scary. I know I’m so cool. I joined the wine tasting club. And then, there’s this really big student organization called SHAWCO at UCT.

 

What’s that?

So it’s volunteering but there’s two different clubs within SHAWCO. There’s SHAWCO Education and there’s SHAWCO health and I joined both. So, SHAWCO education works with younger students. So that could be students in Kindergarten or it could be middle schoolers or even be the equivalent of a senior in high school preparing to go to college hopefully. And so in the very beginning of the semester, you would pick which age group you wanted to work with, and then, we were trained, and then, twice a week you were able to go volunteer at the elementary school you were paired up with. So that was SHAWCO Education. And then, SHAWCO Health we would set up medical clinics and they ran every day. The location depended on what day of the week it was. And so, we would do urinalysis. We would do HIV testing and counseling. We did--

 

That’s a lot of responsibility.

 

Yes. We did blood glucose levels. Things like that, but every time I volunteered I just assisted because I didn’t feel at all comfortable doing any of that on my own. So I would mostly help doing patient histories and talking to the patients. 

 

But it seems like those were all really good ways to immerse yourself in the culture and be able to understand perspectives from people who weren’t necessarily inside of your study abroad program and just traveling from the U.S. or other places to study there.

Exactly.

Well because you were so immersed in the culture, more so than I’d say a lot of study abroad students get to be, I just want to list off some statistics about the inequality in South Africa. I’m sure you know a lot about it, but if not: 

• As of 2020, South Africa has the second-highest income inequality in the world.

• And as of 2019, South Africans with the highest 1% of incomes actually account for 20% of the total income in the country. The top 10% account for 65% of the income. And that leaves the remaining South Africans, which are 90% of the population, to account for only 35% of the income. 

So I basically just wanted to understand if you recognized this disparity while you were living in South Africa and if you did can you tell us about any experiences that you had that really emphasize the inequality in the country?

 

You can definitely see the inequality most places you go and it’s not just the income inequality, but it’s also so closely related to your race which they talk about way more openly than you do here. It’s not weird to say I’m black, you’re white. So, they basically have three main races that they talk about. And if you’re not totally white or totally black you’re colored. 

If you’re mixed. 

 

Whatever that might be. And so your race kind of influences where you live within the city. That’s one way you can really see the divide. Also, when you go out anywhere and you’re at a restaurant, most of the people sitting around you are going to be white and all of the waiters are going to be black. 

 

That’s really interesting.

So that’s definitely something that’s very different than what I was used to. 

 

I know you’ve mentioned to me in the past about this Time article that you read. Do you want to explain that to the listeners a little bit?

 

Oh, yes. Okay. So, I actually-- it came out once I was back, I’m pretty sure.

 

Back in America?

Back in America. There’s a Time article and they use aerial photographs of different places to kind of show how great of a divide there is right next to each other of really, really wealthy communities and really, really poor communities which is very, very common in South Africa and in Cape Town, too. It was really, really eye-opening to see aerial shots of-- there’s a neighborhood called Hout Bay in Cape Town and I knew people from Hout Bay. Hout Bay is really nice. It’s on the water. Parts of it are very lush, very green and there’s even some wineries nearby. But there’s also townships and so you can see from these photos that it’s just all of these shacks on top of each other, piled up right next to a golf course. 

So it’s just a visual representation of that inequality.

 

Exactly. 

 

It’s very interesting because in my experience, at least,  I couldn’t fully recognize the guilt that I felt about studying abroad and having that privilege and being in an area that maybe wasn’t the same as my background, until after I was home looking back on my experience. But for you, it seems like that realization came, at least a little bit, while you were living in Cape Town still. Did that have any impact on the decisions you made about how you spent your money or time? Or how you traveled at all?

 

I wouldn’t necessarily give myself that much credit. I think the cost of living there compared to what I was used to-- the cost of living there is so much lower that we were able to do a lot more and we did take advantage of that. A lot of nights my friends and I would like to get two dinners just because we could. Is that necessarily right? No, but we were students abroad. But at the same time even though we knew that food was so much cheaper or different activities were so much cheaper, it changed the way I thought. I would never say out loud, “oh my god everything is so cheap here,” because I think that’s really offensive. 

 

Which is something you wouldn’t necessarily think about if you were in America and you went out to an inexpensive restaurant? 

 

Yeah and so at first, I don’t think I ever said it. But I did realize pretty quickly that you can’t get in an Uber and talk about how cheap your meal was. That’s rude. It’s wrong because they wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.

 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We’ve heard a lot about the inequality in South Africa today and how it’s seen through the lens of an outsider. So thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Allie! 

 

Thank you!