By Dakota Antelman, Contributing Writer
Shrewsbury – Seeking exposure to the issues facing the rest of the world, Shrewsbury High School graduate Peyton Heller recently spent five weeks in Cape Town, South Africa, volunteering in a local township, taking classes and exploring the country.
Heller traveled with Lead Abroad, a study abroad program based in Atlanta that manages programs in four international cities. She spent four weeks living out of a Cape Town hotel, before traveling to a nearby town to spend a week living with South African children and their families.
“I really wanted to gain knowledge of other cultures and how they live,” Heller said. “When you think of Africa, you don’t really think of it being the safest place or even a place with beautiful views. But when we got to Cape Town, it was so breathtaking,” she said.
Heller said she felt safe in the community, spending many of her evenings exploring the city and interacting with its citizens.
“I was really hoping to get to know the community which we were able to do just by going out to eat and talking to the people at the hotel,” she said. “Cape Town itself had a lot of American people there. Our waiter at dinner one night ended up being from Washington and he had just moved.”
For Heller, who spent her childhood in Shrewsbury often serving on mission trips with her church, the service aspect of the Lead Abroad program drew her to Cape Town with the same strength that her curiosity about the culture did.
Heller said she developed relationships with the people she met in the township, befriending the children while working on craft projects, and engaging in deep conversation with their hosts at night in their homes.
“My house mom, Ms. Denise, welcomed us into her home,” Heller said. “This was the first time she had volunteered to be a house mom so we were kind of like her first students. She opened up to us and we really got to bond.”
Heller explained that the conversations she and the other Lead Abroad students had with her host furthered her understanding of South African culture and history.
“She told us that she had never told people the stories about her childhood [that she told us],” Heller said. “The fact that we were one of the few people in her life that knew this even though we were basically strangers was amazing.”
When she came back to Massachusetts earlier this summer, Heller felt a culture shock as she left the quiet culture of South Africa and returned to the bustling United States.
“In Africa, their dinners are slower and not as loud,” Heller explained. “So just going from being quiet to suddenly coming home was hard because you’re kind of just thrown back into the American ways.”
As she heads back to Alabama for her junior year at the University of Alabama, Heller has her sights set on a return to South Africa – as a Lead Abroad intern next summer.
Peyton, who is already a Lead Abroad student ambassador to her university, is in the process of applying for the internship. She will hear back about that this winter.
Reflecting on seeing her daughter off to Cape Town and her response to the trip since returning, Peyton’s mother Tracey Heller said she relished the opportunity for Peyton to experience life outside of that to which she was accustomed.
“I wanted her to go on this trip and see another part of the world where there are needs and issues,” Tracey said. “I wanted her to see that the world is bigger than Shrewsbury. The world is bigger than social media, the Internet and Gossip Girl.”
To learn more about Lead Abroad, visit www.leadabroad.com.
