I left Cape Town on June 9 2013, after spending a total of 861 days. It feels good to be back home, however, I anticipate the road ahead will be long and hard… re-integration is already proving hard –day 7 in the small mining town of Mufulira, Zambia and bandwidth is already top on the list of things I’ve had to grapple with. It’s expensive and DAMN slow. I saw this coming though…
So I went to Cape Town after I enrolled to get into graduate school, but ended up getting so much more. School was perhaps the best part! I was a member of the Digital Libraries research group [1] of the Computer Science department [2]. I finally submitted my dissertation on April 2, 2013 and currently waiting for feedback from my external and internal examiners. I also had the privilege of working part-time whilst there. I worked as Content Curator for the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) [3], an IDRC-funded project and in the process got to interact with people of varying skill sets –most of them from the social sciences, but some with very strong technical backgrounds.
I also got to met a number of interesting people from all over the African continent and the world over. Interacting with brothers and sisters from West Africa and places like Eritria was something I never even dreamt of doing. To give some context here, I lived in a shared flat with a Kenyan Kikuyu and a Sesotho from South Africa in 2011, a Zimbabwean Shona in 2012 and a South African Xhosa in 2013 –all VERY nice people… Furthermore, my research group culturally diverse, having been composed of individuals from Zimbwabwe, South Africa, Zambia and Sudan.
All in all, I had an amazing time in Cape Town; my two-year long stay there was especially eye-openning, and I can happly say I am a much better person and definitely much wiser 🙂 That said, nothing is perfect in life… I never quite liked Cape Town in Winter, PLUS, it’s pretty much a very individualistic society :p However, I will miss the place.
I have a number of things lined up now that I am back home. The remainder of 2013 is definitely going to be existing…
[1] http://dl.cs.uct.ac.za
[2] http://www.cs.uct.ac.za
[3] http://www.scaprogramme.org.za