South Africa - Reflections

[Reading some of this stuff in retrospect is eerie and enlightening.]


May 31, 2004
I think I've said before that I try not to have any expectations when I go abroad simply because I know it's futile. Things will never be the way you expect them to be, ever. For as much as I profess to be free of expectations, however, it would be impossible for that to be completely true, and this actually gives me some satisfaction since whatever mild expectations I do possess seem always to be exceeded wildly. I can already tell this will be the case with South Africa, just as it was the case with Hong Kong. The more I hear about things to come, the more excited I get. I was already excited about the HIV/AIDS unit in Durban and the trip to Kruger, but now I can also look forward to skydiving or swimming with sharks in Cape Town, getting a feel for what the rest of Africa is like in St. Lucia, and watching the Atlantic and Indian Oceans crash into one another. I feel like I am getting a rare opportunity to experience a lot of amazing things and I feel genuinely lucky to get the chance.



I have a renewed conviction to really appreciate this next month and to constantly remember just how lucky I am. Yesterday, at the orientation meeting, Brooke and Susan mentioned a few things that struck them about being here that they would have to get used to, such as driving on the left side of the road, and I remember thinking I hadn't even noticed the stuff they were talking about. It was all stuff that I have pretty much gotten used to at this point, from living in London and Hong Kong. This made me think back to when we were on the flight over here. I was complaining to Tina about the flight and how much I hated traveling from point to point and she reminded me that it wasn't too long ago that it would have taken a lot longer to get here, if I had even had the opportunity to come at all. I am starting to worry that I may be getting jaded about traveling or becoming a travel snob or, by extension and even worse, a "travel bragger." Someone who goes abroad just to tick another box off the list and to have cool stories once they tell someone, "Oh yeah, I've been there." That is absolutely not what I want. I want to actually get something valuable out of my experiences abroad, and learn from them, and appreciate the fact that I am gaining a much greater understanding of the world by putting everything in a much larger context. I really feel lucky, and I want to remember that feeling through all my experiences here, whatever they may be.

Some of those experiences have already been pretty interesting and they have only been teasers for what's to come. I couldn't believe the disparity in living conditions we saw in Johannesburg today, for instance. The fact that one city can have an area like Alexandra, where people's homes are literally made out of various pieces of scrap, and the area where Nelson Mandela lives, co-existing within miles of one another, simply amazes me. It has certainly sparked my interest in visiting Soweto later this week. I have always been disturbed by the income and social inequality in certain countries. It just seems wrong to me that some people can live in total excess while their neighbors exist in poverty that I, being extremely fortunate, could never even begin to comprehend. I realize that it's not necessarily the fault of the individual who is financially better off, but it certainly speaks to the underlying social systems that these situations are so widespread. After taking a class in Economic Development this last semester, I realized these faulty social systems are everywhere. The world is not a fair place, plain and simple. I'm not sure what can be done about this either. Sometimes I can't help but feel guilty that I have been blessed with so much in this world when the vast majority of people have so little, and I feel that there must be something I can do to help amend the situation, but what can one person really do to fix the world's problems? There will always be poverty and inequality, as much as I hate to admit it. Still, there must be ways to at least alleviate the problem somewhat. I am genuinely looking forward to the section in class on developing countries. I found this topic really interesting last semester, and since I despise economics, I found myself wishing I could somehow separate the development part of the class from the part dealing with economic theories and whatnot. This trip sounds like it just might turn out to be what I was hoping for all last semester.

So far, I haven't had too many experiences here in South Africa. I've learned about its history, seen bits of Johannesburg, and walked around a giant mall, basically. But I can already tell that there will be a lot I can get out of this next month and I am more than ready. It really helps, too, to have such a great group to travel with. From my interactions with everybody, it seems that we will all gel very well and get along great. One thing I've learned in the past two years is that the company you travel with can either enhance or completely take away from your experiences. If the group is as good as I think, then I have no doubt that this next month will definitely exceed my oh-so-mild expectations.

June 5, 2004
This week has really proved to me that this trip through South Africa is going to be very important in a lot of respects. I have been giving a lot of thought to the direction my life is heading in and the directions it could have gone in had I been born a different person, and I think it is important that an experience like this makes me aware of such issues. To begin with, I keep realizing just how lucky I am to be the type of person who gets to be born and raised in a relatively well-off family in the United States, who gets to go to college and travel and learn about things. My daily existence could have been so different. I could be living in a tin shack in an area like Soweto or Alexandra, constantly having to worry about getting robbed or killed. I could be working in a mine shaft day in and day out, existing in claustrophobic darkness and breathing in toxic dust. I could be eking out a meager existence as a farmer's child in China or trying to find a couple hundred dollars to buy a loaf of break in Zimbabwe. A friend told me once after an evening spent whining about homework and exams that less than one percent of the world's population obtains a college education, so I should stop complaining. It's not something I think about too often. I take my life for granted, but then again, everyone does, unless they grew up in abject poverty and somehow improved their station in life.

Now that I'm increasingly and acutely aware of my good fortune in living the life I have, however, the question arises of just what I should do with that life. Where is it taking me? These thoughts existed before this trip, obviously, particularly since I only have one year left before graduation and the advent of adulthood. Anybody my age and in my position is at that point where some serious decisions need to be made, regarding the future and what to do with it. But being here has really added some new levels to this question. Until now, I have been extremely uncertain of the path I will take after I get my degree. Now I feel that I am being given some hints as to what some potential options are. The trip to the US Embassy in Pretoria was especially enlightening in its own way. While I don't know if I would necessarily join the Foreign Service, something along those lines seems increasingly appealing to me. I feel as if I need to start exploring my options, learning about various organizations and their goals and operations. I'm not even sure how to go about doing this. I'm used to having stuff just fall in my lap, to an extent anyway, and I'm really uncertain, with such a plethora of possibilities, as to how I can learn more about things like NGOs and the Foreign Service and the international private sector.

It does seem to me that this is at least a direction that I would be interested in. I've said for the past two years that my ideal plan would be to live outside of America after college, but I simply haven't had an idea of what I would do. I just knew I needed a job in another country or one in which I traveled frequently, at least initially. Maybe when I am in my thirties I'd like to settle in the States but I want to take another route while I'm still younger. Taking a job with something like the Foreign Service or an NGO would allow me to do this while also feeling like I am doing something of importance. Tina has often mentioned the Peace Corps as well, which has its appeal in the fact that I would be helping other people, something that seems increasingly important the more I see and hear about the world.

I often feel that my faith in the world needs a big boost. So many people seem to be dealing with so much suffering and there is definitely no shortage of cruelty and horrible people on this planet. Just hearing about the 9-month-old who was gang raped or the horrible things that are happening in Zimbabwe make my stomach turn. It seems only right that there should be people who do what little they can to help other people considering all the negatives that are going on every day. If I could be one of those people, it may, through working with others, help to give me that boost out of my jaded perspective that I so badly want. On the other hand, I worry that it would simply make me more jaded and lose more hope that this world is anything more than a loose collection of bad events. Who knows. Regardless of my decision, I at least am beginning to have a clue and that is definitely something.

June 11, 2004
I had to laugh earlier this week when Jon made a comment that traveling was great because it enables you to scout out the perfect place for retirement. It's kind of true in a way! I have certainly found myself in each new city I visit making judgments based on whether or not I would choose to live there. I think Cape Town has already made it pretty high up there on my list. I just think that Cape Town is an amazing and beautiful city and has a lot of history and culture that is very unique. I could definitely come back and live here when I get older. I can't imagine settling down in one place, though, not for a long while at least. In my last paper I went off about what I'm going to do with my life when I graduate and I mentioned that I would love to have a job in which I could travel and that still holds true. I would be extremely happy to spend ten or fifteen years moving around and in the process discovering where it is that I would like to eventually settle.

A lot of that stems from the fact that I don't really like, or am not used to anyway, very much stability. I mean, I went to three different elementary schools, two junior high schools, and while I spent 8th through 12th grade in one city, I lived in four different houses in those five years. And that's not even counting all the different places my dad has lived in where we would spend weekends or summers. Then, of course, since coming to Pepperdine, I spent my first year in Malibu, the summer after with my uncle outside LA, then a year in London, a summer in northern California where my family moved while I was abroad, a semester in Malibu, a semester in Hong Kong, and now I'm living out of hotel rooms in South Africa. How completely random. Is it any wonder I don't like to sit still? I have grown so accustomed to living my life in 4-7 month "blocks" that I don't know if I'm capable of staying in one place for any extended period of time. That's really OK with me though. I think it makes me a better person. Someone asked me once where home was for me, and I said that my home just happens to be wherever I am at the moment. I have moved around enough, and so has my family, that I don't think of any specific place as home; it's not a fixed location like my friend Bree who has lived in the same house her entire life (the thought of which trips me out). People have found it strange when I refer to a dorm room or hotel as "home" but I don't think anything of it because that's where I happen to be at the time so, in my mind, "Let's go home" seems like an obvious statement.

I think as a kind of tangential effect of this I have the tendency to create very odd friendships. I guess I would describe them as transitory and deep at the same time if that makes any sense. It's almost as if my mind has convinced itself that no one in my life is going to be around for very long (which hasn't been wrong considering how much I have moved around since high school) and so I can make very intimate and close relationships rather quickly and when the time comes to leave those friends, I'm sad of course but I just kind of get over it. I'm horrible at e-mailing and keeping in touch for exactly that reason. I have to move on and make new friends in my new environment and after a while the friends from each different "block" of my life keep piling up so it's impossible to keep in touch with them all, especially when the reality is that I'm not going to see most of them again. [All I can say is, thank god for the creation of Facebook.] What's the point of building a truly deep friendship that's not just superficially close when I'm inevitably going to leave the person or them me? I think that's why I really treasure the very few friends I have that somehow manage to stick around, like Tina. In the movie "Fight Club," the main character coins the term "single-serving friend" and Tina likes to tease me that the term really applies to me when we go out to bars or clubs or when traveling through youth hostels. She says I'm the master of making someone my best friend for a night and then never talking to them again. I guess she really does know me better than anyone.

Well, if anything, this paper is making me even more grateful that Tina is on this trip with me. I mean, I knew all this stuff already, but it feels strange to write it out. [Still true.] I'm not sure why it's important that Tina's here, but it is. No, I know why it's important. I've become friends with every person on this trip, some better than others, and I would have become friends with them if Tina hadn't been here also, but let's face it, the odds of me gaining a real lasting friendship from this trip are small, and so I'm glad I'm able to experience all of these awesome things with someone who I will be able to talk about them with for years and years. I'm not rejecting the possibility that a great friendship will come out of this program, but I know better than to expect it. Everybody gets a little something added to them by each person they meet, and I know that, so I will just do my best to appreciate every person on this trip and take what I can from each of them, whether that be a new outlook on some random issue or an eternal friendship or just a fun memory. Tina and Holly said they didn't come on this trip to make ten new best friends, and I tend to agree, but I think we would all say that we are better people for having the opportunity to know them.