A flurry of updates…

Up until this week, my experience here has felt largely filtered by the program organizers, whom I feel have chosen certain orientation activities because it’s what they think we want to do, which is somewhat different than what we actually came here to learn. We were shown a slew of beaches, shopping districts, and the best streets for clubs and bars—places tourists would be interested in, I’m sure, and good places to keep in mind for the weekends—but I think they overlooked the fact that many of us chose to come here of all places because it offered a fundamentally serious and thought-provoking experience as well.

It was probably easy to throw a label on all of these water bottle-carrying Americans and show them a good time, but this bread-and-circus orientation fell short on priming most of us for tackling some of the more serious issues we were sure to face in the coming months.

Now that classes have finally started, I think all of us can get out of this retirement home mentality, shake of some of that crusty indolence, and get down to business.

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Classes:
Global Political Thought (chosen mostly because of its excellent primary source reading list)
War and Society
Xhosa

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There’s a certain pattern of pride that I’m starting to see among formerly colonized countries. Some would probably characterize it as a strain of inferiority complex, and others as natural consequence of burgeoning modernity, but in the end it manifests itself in attitude that’s something along the lines of, “Hey, we have what you have. We can do what you do. Look! (please)” It’s this attitude, I think, that leads tour guides and eager locals to take tourists to places that are, ultimately, disappointingly Western, as if to demonstrate what their country has achieved, rather than what makes the country and culture unique.

After China emerged from its 百年羞耻 (“Hundred Years of Shame”), for example, it started to build the skyscrapers, superhighways, and sleek subway systems that have come to characterize a handful of its brochure-friendly cities. For me, however, these very monuments of modernity and pillars of national pride to a certain extent detract from what I’m looking for (however vague that notion may be). And despite the soma-laced rhythm of life in the past two weeks, I think it’s this particular undercurrent of sentiments that I’ve been treading on. It’s as if I’ve been meandering down a long hallway (one very likely decorated by someone with much better taste than I), and I hear a curious cacophony of voices emanating from one of the doorways, and though I’ve found the door I have yet to be let in. Perhaps I’ll let myself in.

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I’ve resolved to expand my cooking repertoire over the course of this semester. I suspect that last semester I would have taken the title of “Independent Who Not Only Cooked the Least But Also Knew How to Cook the Least.” Our Spelman kitchen consisted of an impressive collection of two forks, an overused frying pan, an aging spoon, a single all-purpose bowl, and usually some eggs, a lonely stick of butter and a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator. On special occasions, we would borrow “supplies” (like salt) from our sympathetic (and skeptical) neighbors, but for the most part we were minimalists in every sense of the word.

This semester, I’m living with eight people from six different countries (not to mention the 22 across the street) who mostly know how to cook, and so I’m going to take the next 5 months to build that culinary knowledge base.