Becca found excursion helped all she had learned in the classroom to click

Going to Johannesburg and experiencing a different part of Cape Town was really interesting and a great experience. I am not really a museum person but I did enjoy all of the museums that I went to while in Johannesburg. The things we have been learning in Vincent’s class like the Soweto uprising and the Sharpeville Massacre just really came to life and just finally clicked when we went to the museums in saw all the photographs. It was like something just clicked, especially with the Soweto uprisings. I mean they were just kids protesting for a better education and they were shot at by police. I think the Hector Peiterson Museum, because it really does show how much power students, people like me have. They sparked a reaction to the apartheid system across the nation, so even though I really don’t care for politics and everything like that, it was nice to know that when it does come to a being heard, I do have the power to be heard despite being young. 

I also really liked the Nelson Mandela exhibit at the Apartheid Museum. It was really cool seeing pictures of his life that I had read about in “The Long Walk to Freedom”. I also really liked how they had quotes of his about things like courage, loyalty, and other qualities and aspects of life. I thought the quotes were really inspiring and the lay out of the exhibit was really well done. 

The thing that blew my mind about the apartheid was the media coverage about the events like the uprisings and just the violence that people really experienced when it came to the living under the apartheid system. And just the people that I met how experiencing the apartheid and everything. Like Alice from the Sharpeville Memorial was just the sweetest lady ever. The struggle caused her to lose so many family members, including her husband and two of her kids. Yet I found it so strong and inspiring to see her talking about the massacre and how it helped shift the fight in their favor.

What I also liked about excursion was I really got to learn about other problems South Africa faces that I am just not exposed to here in Cape Town. When we went to the Boys and Girls Club in Soweto, I really got to learn about the short-comings in the school systems here. I was cataloguing the kid’s report cards and some of them are not doing so well in school. Some are passing with less than 50% and yet they move onto the next grade. To me that is crazy. Not only that but I met this one little girl there who was partially deaf and she wasn’t attending school. The people at the Boys and Girls Club were trying to get here into a deaf school but they couldn’t find documentation to prove that she was a South African citizen so she just doesn’t go to school or anything. That is just so sad and the whole concept would terrify me. Not being about to effectively communicate with anyone would be so frustrating, and I could tell she was getting frustrated when we were playing with her and everything. It was an eye-opening experience. 

Overall, I really enjoyed travelling to Johannesburg. Just seeing everything and being able to travel to Soweto and Sharpeville really just made everything that we have been learning in the classroom click. And even though Johannesburg was a pretty cool city, to be perfectly honest it feels so good to be back in Cape Town.