back from vacation

Here are some hi-lights from the trip:

From left to right: Steve, Susan (Prexy's traveling companion), Valeriano Ferrao (former ambassador of Mozambique to the United States), Prexy and me having dinner in Maputo, Mozambique. Maputo is the capitol city.
Steve and I with Nava and her parents at their home in Gaborone, Botswana. Nava is my roommate in Cape Town and she invited us to her home in Bots for some delicious homemade Persian delights cooked up by her talented mom! Gaborone is the capitol city of Bots. Albeit, there's no city center, a lot of people say that it is a city of highways. 
This is the zebra that tried to kill me in the front seat of the car (you can see my skirt in the bottom right corner of the frame, I had made a move for the backseat). This is at the Gaborone game reserve. 
This is my birthday celebration back in Cape Town. My roommates and I spent the whole morning at Cape Town's finest bakery. 

**I've posted most pics from the trip on facebook.com

Steve left South Africa on Tuesday and I went back to school for second semester on Wednesday. Perfect timing! 

This semester will be pretty busy. I'm taking two courses: African Politics and Political Journalism. I'm trying to beef up my understanding of how politics relate to civil society in Africa and perhaps gain perspective on why there are so many failed states on the continent. In addition, I'll also be looking at how African conflicts are portrayed in the United States media. Many say that there is a certain demeaning vocabulary used when relaying African conflicts in the news and in films. It's a vocab that is not used when describing events in Europe, Asia, or conflicts anywhere else on earth. A word like "tribal" would be used to replace the word "ideological" when covering an African story as opposed to a European story... more on that later. 

This semester I will also be tutoring for the African Studies department. Three times a week I will host a discussion group of 15 undergraduate students. The students have a lecture with the African Studies professor, then I will work with them on a more personal basis (I'll also get to grade papers!). I thought this would be a good way to expand on my education here, but also to earn some $$$$, or in the South African Rand it would be: RRRRRR. That's a little currency humor for you.