In July 2013 I embarked on a journey to South Africa to work for Restless Development, the youth-led development agency as a part of International Citizen Service — a UK government-funded development programme. This is the space for my reflections about it, and the place in my life I’m in as a result of it.

The subtitle ‘project’ South Africa is a bit ironic, but also has some truth to it. On the one hand, I’m fully aware that I’ll not facilitate ‘development’ among the youth of SA in 10 weeks. This is not the aim of my volunteering there by any means. But it is a project for me, or rather a project for a ‘new myself’. I’m a recent graduate and this project fits perfectly into a stereotype of a fresh graduate on a mission to make the world a better place.

All I hope to achieve is share skills that can be useful for young people of a developing country and facilitate them among the members of the rural community I will live in. It is as much ‘learning experience’ for me, as for the youth I’ll be running workshops for. Actually, volunteering in Africa takes the meaning of being ‘open-minded‘ to a totally new level. Nothing that is ‘normal’, ‘casual’ or ‘average’ for me, will be so for a South African teenager.

I find this video particularly catchy and eyes-opening when it comes to prejudice.

What South Africa means to me at the moment? The first things that come my mind are high attitudes and the ocean, apartheid and Nelson Mandela, Sixto Rodriguez, young democracy, violence… painful history. I've just started my education about SA equipped with novels, short stories, history and politics books. Having read couple hundreds of pages so far, I see in these life stories of South Africans what I somehow anticipated; natives struggle to show their side of the story to the Western Europeans. Their identities stem from the need to reaffirm the audience and themselves of what they are NOT.

I start my journey in 2 days and I bet that on the arrival in East London (SA) on Monday, I’ll be proven wrong when it comes to the above presumptions. But I couldn't be more excited to find that out myself.