Ramona in South Africa

My story

It starts with wild plans, you look into your options, you keep going, you buy plane tickets, it all seems far away and before you know it you’re in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. From that moment on, time flies.

For my final-year internship I travelled to South Africa together with Selke. To take on a challenge, explore the world and learn a lot. Looking back I can say: you get so much more than you expected.

You arrive in Port Elizabeth and meet 20 to 40 other people who are also looking for new experiences, and with them you share rooms, showers, funny moments and sad moments for at least five weeks. During the week you run the sports sessions for the children together, and at weekends you go off together to discover the beautiful things the country has to offer. Teaching sports sessions together was a challenge. You’re dealing with different languages and cultures, not only between you as a coach and the Xhosa or Afrikaans children, but also between you and the other coaches. I learnt that together you can get the most out of a session, but you both sometimes have to adapt and accept things from each other that you might not normally accept easily.

As a Dutch person, I also improved my English enormously there. At first I felt I couldn’t be myself in English, but thanks to all the English speakers around me who corrected me every day and taught me new words, I can now say that I speak English with confidence.

We were lucky that the summer holidays there fall in December. That gave us four weeks to travel. First with a group of everyone who would be staying on at UTS after the summer, and later with my family as well. South Africa is an amazingly beautiful country. Diverse in everything: houses, nature, animals and of course people. The legacy of apartheid is still visible; work is being done on it, but there are still big differences. If you get the chance to explore this beautiful country, you should definitely take it.

On 31 December at 00:00 I was standing on the stunning Waterfront in Cape Town with friends from England, Germany and Holland whom I had met at United Through Sport. Everyone was intensely happy, so we raised a glass of champagne to round off our wonderful time together in 2017.

Other amazing things I did in South Africa: surfing, skydiving, watching a football match & a rugby match, a festival, a food truck market, climbing Table Mountain, singing karaoke at Barneys and daring to dance among the good dancers at White Tiger.

I had an amazing time in this beautiful country, unforgettable, full of wonderful moments that will never be forgotten and with people… I will never forget.