Saturday, August 8, 2009

Big news; It's Richmond

Need to write only briefly for now, but the placements came out last night and I'm going to Richmond, South Africa in the Northern Cape Province. It's a HUGE opportunity and challenge because myself and the other GRS intern being sent with me (Anna...she's awesome) are not going to have a boss or anything besides phone contact with HQ in Cape Town and we'll be creating new GRS programs in the small towns in the area.

Richmond looks pretty bumble; it took us about 15 minutes just to actually locate it definitively. But it looks like a great opportunity to be really out there in the thick of it doing the real GRS work and bringing sustainable HIV/AIDS education to this rural community. More to come soon...we have the weekend off and will be surfing, going to rugby, and hiking table mountain.

Very excited, and it's good to just know where I'll be for the year. Not much in the way of the World Cup out in the Great Karoo Desert, but we'll definitely be able to drive the 4-5 hours back into Cape Town or Bloemfontein to be around the energy when everything goes down next June.

Here's a bit about Richmond, from a local guy's website:

"The small town of Richmond, Northern Cape, is situated on the N1 roughly half way between Cape Town and Johannesburg and equally half way between the two major Karoo towns of Colesberg and Beaufort West. Placed in the heart of the Great Karoo Desert, which the locals like to describe as the World's best developed desert, Richmond is ideally situated as the perfect stop over but perhaps more as a point of departure to explore the wonders of the Karoo."

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