A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...

Hello out there!  Our names are Julianne and Ally and we spent six weeks of our summer performing a program evaluation for a non profit (RealStart) in George, South Africa.  George is a picturesque seaside town located about 4 hours east of Cape Town in a region called the Western Cape, and sits right on the coast of the Indian ocean.

George is a relatively small town by South Africa standards, with a population of 120,000. Like the rest of South Africa, it is incredibly diverse and unequal with large affluent golf resorts backing onto poverty stricken townships.

We arrived in George on Thursday, May 16^th, after 48 hours of traveling, two upgraded first class tickets, one ripped pair of jeans and one coke stained pair of leggings…and one lost bag. All three of our suitcases managed to make it across three continents, yet somehow the journey from Johannesburg to George was too much of a stretch. Here, finding a lost bag is like trying to track a tadpole in a large pond.  All of the bags have labels on them, but no one knows where they are.  After numerous phone calls with the typical response, “um, we’ll look for it” or “let me ask my friend who works in the airport” (we know what that really means), and a day of sharing clothes, we finally decided to head out to the airport and wait there until they located the bag. They told us they had heard nothing of the bag since their last employee had called earlier that morning.  Their suggestion was wait for the next flight from Jo-burg landing in George in 15 minutes and see if it had appeared with the luggage.  We waited for the flight and then watched all of the luggage filter through and no bag.  Then, Julianne looked across the room and low and behold her bag was sitting in the corner of the room...just chillin’.

A little bit about RealStart – RealStart is a South African based non-profit which focuses on the holistic development of impoverished young people. They currently run a year-long youth development program across two campuses, with the hope of expanding the program throughout the country. They also have a number of other exciting projects in the pipeline. I (Alison) have been affiliated with RealStart for a number of years and have known its founder for five years. This was Julianne’s first interaction with the organization.

The first week of our evaluation consisted of us finding out a little more about RealStart and what it was they wanted us to achieve with our evaluation. As non-experts in the field, we spent copious hours sitting outside in the sun reading a program evaluation textbook one of our professors had given us.

We soon discovered that we did not have enough data (RealStart is only 3 years old) to do a quantitative evaluation and thus had to focus on a more qualitative one. The next few days involved writing up questionnaires and contacting as many stakeholders as we possibly could in order to set up interviews to ask them questions about the organization and their relationship with it.

Our next blog post will be coming soon...check in for the next installment, which may contain a crazy adventure or two!