reflection

I don't think I prepared myself for going back home. I think being back with my family will be easy, things there don't change a whole lot, and even when they do its usually something material that I can bring into my life with little resistance. Going back to school is going to be really difficult. Tonight I realized how much is going on without me; how many stupid youtube clips and other nonsensical pop-culture bits are popularizing themselves with my friends, and I'm sitting here, half a world away; oblivious. In some ways this experience has been really rewarding: I've become a lot more focused on what I want to do. But in other ways it has felt very stagnant. So I don't really know how to reconcile all of this. I'm scared things are going to be harder than I imagined with my friends and Tim, and going back to Willamette. Of course I miss it, but I'm also sort of in that "third phase of culture shock" where I'm making friends here and learning to understand this culture. So it will be difficult, I feel, to leave here and go back home. I wonder if it will feel like a step forward or a step back? Academically, I'm excited to go home. Socially, in most respects I want to go home. But for all its quirkiness, and all my confusion, I like South Africa, even if I don't think Grahamstown is always all that great.

I still can't believe I'm in Africa. I think I've always had this weird spacial hangup, like being on another continent will physically feel different; like the air will smell different and the earth will look different. The truth is, no matter where I go I've still got my feet on solid ground. The air is still nitrogen and oxygen. The only difference is the people who live there, and, of course, landscape and weather. But I'm still on Earth; this isn't some alien place that is unimaginable. Now that I've set food on Africa, a place I've always orientalized, I feel like I have a better appreciation for travel. I feel like I could go to Palestine, or Egypt, or Libya or something and even though it would feel socially polar to my norm, I am still a person and I could navigate the landscape. Its a very reassuring feeling.

When I first applied to study abroad I thought I would come back totally changed. When I first got here I thought I would go home the same person I left as. Now I realize that I'm changing but in these very tiny, almost imperceptible ways. I think that is why going back home is going to be so difficult for me. Maybe I don't totally appreciate the gravity of the water shortage here, but I will definitely appreciate the abundance, and the taste, of it at home.

I feel like I'm in this weird in-between place. I'm not the same American I was when I left, I'm nowhere near being South African. One of my friends here told me that I seemed more like a "citizen of the world" than the other Americans she'd met. I suppose that's a compliment. One thing I've really come to understand about myself while I've been here is that for all its faults, I really love the United States; I just have incredibly high standards for it. This, I feel, is a product of the image the United States attempts to project of itself, which, I believe, serve as standards for itself. The US should strive to live up to this fair, equal land of opportunity and promise which it claims to be. It should be more of a community, less of a cluster#*&$ of people just trying to get by. Several people in my dining hall got the impression that I don't like the US very much, but the truth is I just want to be able to be proud of it and I honestly can't say that I am yet. Hopefully we'll get there.