Amy Biehl Internship Description

Amy Biehl Internship Description By Megan Stewart

This summer, I spent July and August in Cape Town, South Africa, working for the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, a non-governmental organization dedicated to providing a variety of educational programs and opportunities to disadvantaged youth in the Western Cape Province. The organization was established in 1997 to continue the work of Amy Biehl, an American Fulbright Scholar, who was working and studying in

Cape Town in the early 1990s, and who was killed by a politically incited mob in 1993.

Though the Foundation Trust is a USAID funded body, it is a South African organization in that it employs primarily South Africans of all races, and is focused on helping the

South African people to help themselves. It also hires a number of interns, usually

American, throughout the year, for various periods of time. The current Program

Director, Ashleigh Murphy, is a young American woman, intent on ensuring that the work of the Foundation Trust is background work and that the foreigners working there do not try and import North American values and customs into the organization.

While I had a tremendously eye-opening experience in Cape Town, and met some great people, the work that I was involved in with the Foundation Trust was only marginally law-related. My main project was to prepare for a fundraiser that was to be held at the end of August. It consisted of soliciting Cape Town and South African businesses for funding and donations, dealing with the logistics of the evening of the fundraiser and overseeing the actual event. Because I did want to do some legal work while I was there, I created a job for myself which was to revise the organization’s

Human Resources Handbook. This involved reviewing labour and employment acts, occupational health and safety acts, and updating the HRH to ensure its compliance with any new or changed provisions. I also visited the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town, which is a clinic that has argued some of the most famous South African constitutional law cases in the past couple of decades, and met with the Director. I ended up writing a memo for a lawyer from the clinic on my own time, so that gave me a bit more legal work. However, I spent most of my time working on things related to fundraising.

I would strongly recommend that those who have any type of interest in constitutional litigation investigate the possibility of working at the Legal Resources

Centre in Cape Town, rather than at the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust. The Centre does hire interns, and although it is currently trying to recruit African interns, having spoken with the Director, I think that it would be open to considering a U of T law student in the future. The lawyers there work on some very important high profile human rights cases, and from what I saw, interns would get some great opportunities to participate in those.

Alternatively, if the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust is still of interest, I would recommend that a potential intern have a very clear and detailed outline of the kind of work s/he is interested in doing for the organization, because otherwise s/he might find her/himself stuck in a job of little interest. There are also other legal organizations in Cape Town that

I’m sure would be interested in having interns, but part of the problem in South Africa is that people often don’t respond quickly, if at all. Persistence does pay off though, so keep trying. Phone calls may work better than e-mail.

One excellent feature of the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust is that because it is so used to having interns there all the time, they have a very good system in place. There is an intern house (which is free of charge) and an intern car available (but only interns there for a year are allowed to drive it). The car is great because although Cape Town is easy to get around in during the day, it becomes difficult at night. Also, going away on weekends can be a bit of a hassle if you don’t have access to a car. Transport is one of the biggest ongoing problems in South Africa generally, for those visitors who don’t have private means of getting around.

Otherwise the city itself is awesome, there are tons of outdoor activities to do on weekends (hiking, etc.), and lots of daytrips. Be forewarned though the city is much smaller than Toronto, and takes some adjustment. July and August are “winter” months, but think mid to southern California in winter, and that’s the temperature. I was told to expect lots of rain, but I guess I got lucky because it didn’t rain much at all while I was there.

And definitely bring your laptop and internet cable because computer resources are scarce and/or expensive. Everything else is probably going to be a lot cheaper than in

Toronto though. Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions about

Cape Town or the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, I’d be glad to talk about it with you if you are interested in going ([email protected])!