Hi, I'm Lale Aricoglu, and this is Women Who Travel.

Today, I'm talking to Zandile in Lovu, South Africa's first black female diving instructor

and the founder of the Black Mermaid Foundation.

She's also featured on our women who travel power list, which came out last month.

When she spoke with contributor Sarah Khan, she said something that has really stayed with me.

When I found the ocean, it felt like finding home.

And now through her work, she's committed to helping others feel the same way.

To feel at home is to feel free just as you are.

It is to not try and posture to live towards the bounded world.

It is to feel wild and free and full. And that is home

for me. I've always battled to fit in. And all of a sudden, there was this one place where the

ultimate of my beliefs were affirmed. You don't have to look a certain way. Everything looks different.

And everything looks so different. There is no one normative in the ocean.

You said that you had spent a long time feeling like you didn't fit in or couldn't find places where you felt like you fit in.

Expand on that a little. Talk a little bit about what that meant growing up. You know, you grew up from what I understand in Johannesburg

and then you moved to Cape Town. What was fitting in for you? When I was little, I didn't look

a girl enough. I didn't behave a girl enough. This means that when you would go out and play

with my sister, my sister comes back looking pristine and pretty and I come back looking brown

from top to bottom and I'd get a beating

for it, right? Later on in the workplace, what does it mean to be a black person in a space that

has always been violent on our bodies? And so as you experience the violence of racism, of prejudice,

you're continuously saying, but I am not only black and I am not only a woman.

...