NEWS

Local angles: Chapel Hill, Nashville, Tenn.

UNC students to immerse selves in South African culture, studies

By PATRICK HOGAN
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Seventeen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomores and juniors will spend the upcoming semester in Cape Town, South Africa, studying the country's conflicts, culture and politics and serving internships at agencies throughout the city.

The internships, each 30 to 40 hours weekly, will be for non-governmental organizations including a refuge for battered women, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and a conflict resolution center, where a student will join efforts to ensure inmates' human rights at the prison where Nelson Mandela once was held.

Other students will intern at a school for autistic children, a newspaper, a radio station and a Red Cross hospital, where they will work with children who have AIDS or are HIV-positive.

"The opportunities that will be presented to our students through these internships are unbelievable," said Dr. Ross Lewin, director of the Burch Field Research Seminars and Honors Studies Abroad programs at UNC. "Our Cape Town internship program really is second to none."

Made possible by the Burch program, the fall study abroad offers 12 academic credit hours and will center on two courses the students take at the University of Cape Town from Dr. Julius Nyang'Oro, a UNC professor of African and Afro-American studies and chair of that department.

The students, who will live in houses near the university, also will attend lectures and briefings by local academic, business and political leaders, thereby fully immersing themselves in the social, cultural and political environment of South Africa, Lewin said. They also will travel in Zimbabwe and Tanzania for two weeks to study Southern African culture on a regional level.

Since the early 1980s, South Africa and the rest of the continent have experienced a wave of political liveliness, exemplified by the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. His election as the first post-apartheid president of South Africa in the first free, multi-racial election in the nation has had a tremendous impact on the political climate of the Southern Africa region, Lewin said.

The Burch program, made possible by an endowment from 1963 alumnus Lucius E. Burch III, seeks to reinforce the connection between faculty research and undergraduate education by including students in ongoing faculty research at off-campus locations, both domestic and international. Burch is chief executive officer and chair of Burch Investment Group, a private venture capital company in Nashville, Tenn.

- 30 -

(Hogan is a senior journalism and mass communication major from Louisville, Ky.)

Contact: Ross Lewin, 919-962-9680, rlewin@email.unc.edu