Inaugural post

When I can find the time to take a breath, I am incredibly excited for South Africa and Zambia. The thing is, I want to be immersed in culture, not watch it from a tourist bubble. I'm ready to visit a place in order to learn about it, not just sightsee and shutter myself off from the culture. That's what I especially like about this trip. Trying to broaden your horizons is more than being physically in a place. It's becoming involved there, and under their rules, not yours.

Recently, when I've talked about this trip with people, they've seemed to label it as a humanitarian aid mission. That, I feel, is a little misleading. I am under no illusions that I can hand out anti-malarial bednets, teach about HIV/AIDS, show farming techniques, or run a microfinance company any better than the people who are doing it already. Nor am I under the illusion that the main goal of the trip is to provide manpower for those causes. Our direct impact on those causes will be minimal, except for maybe the donations. Our time, effort, and money is spent there for a different purpose.

We are going to South Africa and Zambia so that we can learn. We're going to learn about the problems, the current solutions, the potential solutions, and how we can help. But we're also there to learn about the culture, the people... and, really, ourselves. Both the American and the rest of the world community often discuss Africa as an abstract concept of turmoil, poverty, and exoticness. In doing so, they create a stereotype and forget that Africa is composed of 54 countries filled with thousands of different cultures. (The number of times I've heard Africa referred to as a country is both hilarious and terrifying.) What is Africa, in truth? Truthfully, I'm not sure, and I'm not ashamed of that. I've never been to any part of Africa. It would be worse to believe that I was sure, since that would be a bald-faced lie to myself and everyone else. That's why I'm going: to see a bit of what Africa is, and though that, to experience the world.