By Malaya Madison
While scrolling on Instagram one afternoon before school started, I noticed an interesting trend. Almost every post or story I saw was from someone who had gone to Africa over the summer.
Whether it was students traveling with their families or with teen excursion companies like “Moondance” or “Girls Gone Global,” Africa was everywhere. But what made this destination so popular?
I decided to speak with some of those students who had ventured into countries such as Ghana, Mozambique, and South Africa.
Sophomore Betsy Gheghan traveled to Africa with Moondance. Moondance is an adventure and travel summer camp.
She chose Africa so she could do cultural immersion and visit smaller towns. Apparently, not many trips make this possible, so she was intrigued.
Gheghan traveled to South Africa for 13 days and Mozambique for 4 days.
She said that a lot of people go around this age because we are “more mature”.
She highly recommends traveling to Africa. “It’s actually one of the coolest things I’ve ever done,” she said, calling it a “once in a lifetime experience.”
Highlights included afternoon safaris and the moment when she tagged an elephant. This involved attaching an electronic device to track the animals and monitor their movements.
Experiences like that made her feel like she was “living in the moment.” Often, things felt surreal.
“I’m walking, and I’m seeing a lion right next to me,” she said. “It was never boring.”
Sophomore Zoe Bockel also went to Africa with Moondance. Like Ghegan, Zoe was intrigued by the service portion and cultural immersion and also very excited to see all of the animals.
Her Moondance group “positively affected her trip.” It was all “ so much fun,” she said.
Bockel faced some of her fears while in Africa, but in a helpful way.
She learned that she is not afraid of hyenas, and she even touched one. “They’re actually so cute,” she said.
She even gave a rhino one a shot.
Bockel chose to go through Moondance to be with friends and to “ get a different outlook because I wouldn’t have my phone, and I could actually just like take in everything,” she shared.
Ultimately, she learned to appreciate people more. “It has influenced me to be nice to everyone,” she said, “cause you never know what they have going on at home.”
Unlike Gheghan and Bockel, junior Zarin Sapra went to Africa with her family.
The Sapra family decided to go to Africa because their dad “has been wanting to go to South Africa specifically for 5 years,” she shared.
But he was waiting for Zarin and her sister, Sloane Sapra ‘29, to grow older.
This was the year he felt like they were “old enough to really experience it and remember it,” she said.
One night at dinner here in Atlanta, their waiter was South African, so it was a sign that pushed them to go.
Zarin was kind of against going at first because she was convinced she’d have to see an animal “get shredded apart” or “eaten.”
But she was happily surprised when she got there, because “it was very humane and calm.”
They visited South Africa for almost all of July, then they visited Cape Town, Kruger Park, and a private reserve.
Something that stood out to her about the kids in South Africa is that “they’re the same age as me, but they’re just doing completely different things,” she shared.
Her favorite part was observing all of the animals. “When we saw the elephants, it was just insane because you were seeing them outside of the zoo and in their actual state,” she said.
Of course, seeing animals sometimes required her to get up pretty early. But she came to love the sunrise safaris. “Animals and people were waking up together, so we were all experiencing the same thing,” she said. “The sunrises were beautiful.“
Looking back, she said that Africa is a “place where you have to be able to fully experience everything.”
Like Zarin, sophomore Harper O’Keefe visited Africa with her family.
“We always wanted to go there, so it kind of just seemed like this summer was a good time to go,” she said.
They stayed in Kenya and Zanzibar for around three weeks.
One very spontaneous experience she had was attending a Kenyan wedding.
“It was really cool to see what all that was, and me, my sisters, and my mom got to meet the bride,” she said.
O’Keefe shared that this trip made her more compassionate towards others, and it made her think about “how much we have and not take it for granted.”
While some students traveled to Africa with their families or Moondance, sophomore Micah Ingram went with a program called Girls Gone Global, a program dedicated to empowering African-American teenage girls to become global citizens.
While her mom introduced her to the program, she’d long wanted to go to Africa to experience different cultures and broaden her perspective.
Ingram traveled to Ghana, Cape Town, and Cape Coast during her two-week stay.
She went in with certain stereotypes in mind, for example, that most cities would be very poor and destroyed, but her trip defied her expectations. She found it to be “very beautiful.”
“It was more developed than I thought it would be,” she said, “and I feel like it didn’t match up to what we learn in school.”
Her favorite part of the trip was building relationships with all of the girls and meeting different people from Ghana.
“They were all so welcoming, and I could really feel the sense of love and community,” Micah shared.
Although all of these students had different experiences, their visits all had something in common. This trip to Africa gave them opportunities to step outside their everyday lives and be more grateful for the world around them.
Ultimately, Africa changed a lot of Lovett lives this summer. Micah put it best, when she observed how the trip opened her eyes to “how beautiful and big the world is and that if you stay in your little bubble, you’ll never learn and experience new things.”
