Cape Town, South Africa

After leaving Zwelethemba, we returned to Cape Town, where we will spend the remainder of our stay in South Africa. We were put in homestay families in the Bo Kapp, an area that historically was where colored people, mostly Muslims, lived. The Bo Kapp is a beautiful place that is situated on a hill. As the Bo Kaap overlooks the rest of Cape Town, its residents are sometimes teased for being able to see what everyone else is doing.

Living in and moving around in Cape Town has given me many new realizations and has been an intense learning experience, as every other location has been.

• Cape Town has given me a new concept of safety. While Cape Town is in some ways known for crime, I never fully realized what that meant until I had to avoid being out too late at night, walking in groups once it gets dark and to always call to let people know of my whereabouts. In some ways, this is in some ways a hassle and limits your independence. However, it has taught me to be flexible with my time and taken the concept of "going with the flow" to a new level. I find it ironic that such beauty and high crime rate can coexist in the same place. This experience has also made me question our perceptions of risk. For example, I have changed my behavior because I perceive my risk of being mugged as high due to my visibility as a tourist and due to my unfamiliarity with the area. In an earlier post I wondered about the obstacles that people faced to change their behavior. Perhaps behavior change comes down to risk perception. We are less reluctant to change behaviors that could possibly give us diseases that might happen in the long-run or worsen chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer. However, we are very willing to change our behavior in the face of acute infections or diseases, such as SARS. Risk perception is definitely a concept that I will have to think about more in terms of how it impacts our behavior and others' actions in the future.