Cape Town

 This experience has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. The organization of the program is fantastic. The opportunity to stay with a family is one of a kind and truly gives you an amazing immersive experience in a such a short amount of time. The hospital taught me so much about ways in which our own system could better utilize the resources we have and change our way of thinking when it comes to managing patients with minimal resource availability. By far my favorite part of this program was getting to make friends from across the world that I know will last for a lifetime. 

 A month does not seem like a substantial amount of time to make an impact on an individual person, however I have found that a month of traveling to a different country alone is like a pressure cooker for individual change. You are forced to be incredibly self sufficient, you interact with so many new people on a daily basis and many of these people are from different cultures. You constantly have to think about your own culture, your own identity, your strengths and your weaknesses. You need to solve your own problems or at least be able to identify who can help you solve the problem. In addition, being in a completely different hospital system, quickly needing to identify the different needs of the system and the patients can be quite challenging, but in the same way it forces you to think more about our own system and identify the advantages and weaknesses of it. 

Once I arrived in Cape Town I quickly learned the term "load shedding" and its meaning. About 1 hour after I arrived all the power in my homestay went out. This power outage was a scheduled outing that occurred multiple times a day and was referred to as load shedding. This had been occurring for a few months before I arrived and there still is no plan for it ending. To the people in Africa this is an occurrence that greatly inconveniences their lives and adds regular challenges to their days, however they took on this inconvenience with such a positive manner. The entire concept was often a subject of jokes and utilized as an opportunity to come together and help one another. The family I was with would tell me that they as a people have suffered many challenges over the years, but that they are people who dance and sing when they are sad and struggling and that was extremely evident over the course of time I spent there.