An inspiring remote internship experience in South Africa

I chose to do a remote internship with VACorps as a pre-cursor to coming to South Africa. During the three months I learned a lot about the culture and the people. This was possible due to the weekly remote interactions and video calls and I would not be as knowledgable coming to Cape Town if I didn’t get the opportunity to understand more about the country I am going to travel to.

I loved the intimate buddy calls - I could ask anything I wanted to know more about and I felt welcomed without actually having stepped a foot on the ground yet.

As a Human Rights Intern, I was under the supervision of Kelly and Simon. They were wonderful mentors and gave me the freedom to work flexibly and at my own pace. Their warm personalities aided in my remote experience and I look forward to meeting with them in person.

I would highly recommend an initial remote internship experience to others wishing to go to South Africa - coming from a completely different society and culture, it made my understanding of the people and country more fulfilling and it eases the transition into going to Cape Town in person.

As a recently graduated Masters student, I was still in the mind-frame of being the student/learner. It took me the whole three months to get out of that mind-frame. It was difficult to get a perception of what was needed of me when I didn’t have a real-life understanding of what was expected of me. However, I feel that now, once I reach Cape Town, I will be able to provide my knowledge and know-how in a more realistic and tangible way. I feel that this remote internship experience had a HUGE impact on my self-esteem and made me realise that I have more potential than I thought I had. I felt that this remote experience was necessary for my in-country experience in the next few months.