Africa 2007 Trip Homepage
The 2007 trip was the fourth installment of the Africa study abroad program. As is our pattern, we kept much the same from past trips and tried to add something new. Remaining the same was our time in Namibia and South Africa, although with the normal modifications and variations on our past programming. Our curricular focus remained Apartheid, state building and democratization. We met with various politicians, academics, activists and everyday people. We did homestays in the former township of Katatura, outside Windhoek. We also had a profound experience doing service learning in an orphanage in Katatura. We scaled back our time in South Africa by a few days compared to past trips. We started in Johannesburg and drove to Durban through Zululand, where we stayed in the Zulu capital of Ulundi for three days. We flew from Durban to Capetown, where we stayed for five days.
New to the program was a 10-day camping trip through northern Botswana. We had gone on a 10-day camping trip through northern Namibia on the last trip in 2005, and so moving that experience over to Botswana was a new and exciting opportunity. We had visited Botswana in 2003, but only for three days and we stuck to the environs of the capital city, Gabarone. Our goal in traveling through the north was to gain an on-the-ground appreciation for natural environment of Southern Africa, and also to gain access to Bushmen cultures and history in the central Kalahari Desert.