Insight and Ingestion...

When we went to Eleverum on Monday we were invited to dinner by one of the associates at the Namibia Association. This dinner party was tonight.
It was lots of fun. There were some guests of the Namibia House from Namibia and Tanzania there as well as our group of 10 American, 4 Namibian and 1 Zambian student. Not to mention the Norwegian family hosting us and our Norwegian professor, Inger.
It was a full house.

My roommate Bryanna and I had an interesting conversation with one of the Namibian guests about his experiences in the USA. He was a student at Penn State University a few years ago, and visited New York City while he was there. He shared a funny story about how they had been briefed before coming to the United States about how fancy Penn State was and everything. But when he got there, he wanted to take a shower and there was only one tap--he turned it on and it was freezing cold, and he was like, "What?! How can this be a prestigious, wealthy school and they can't even afford warm water?!" So for 3 days he washed himself with freezing cold water, until one day he wasn't paying attention turning the faucet and all of a sudden the water was burning hot, and he was so confused, until he realized there was one tap that controlled hot and cold.

I thought it was a funny story. He also mentioned that whenever he went to New York City, he didn't get anywhere because he was so distracted by the number of people, and how different they all were and interesting they all looked; he just stood around looking at all the people, astounded at how there could be so many different people in one place.

Currently, he is a sort of principal for a district of schools in Namibia. One of the interesting things that Bryanna learned and shared with me is that in all the courses taught in the schools he works with, they have to teach AIDS awareness, which is a little touchy, because its a kind of "taboo" subject. Sometimes he has to talk to teachers, because they have a hard time talking about AIDS in class, but they have to, its required, so he has to go in and talk with them.

Another interesting conversation I had tonight was with one of our Namibian classmates, Français. Another student from PLU (Joe) and I were talking with him, and Joe mentioned something about the war in Iraq--and Français said something that just struck me really weird: "Oh, is that still going on?"

It was very weird--This THING is such a huge part of American foreign identity, that defines Americans when they're abroad--I mean, how many people in Germany asked (or more like lectured) me about the war? Just about everyone?--and it was like Français had missed the memo. It was like he was from a different world or something. In a way, it was refreshing--relieving to realize that as Americans, we didn't have that connection attached to us for him. It was as if it was a brick in our luggage that we are forced to bring abroad, and Français, with only 5 words, unpacked it and threw it out.

And when I think about it, there are so many other disasters and devastations, and just different issues in Africa, that would effect their lives (and define them, probably, in the way that Iraq does us) that our war on terrorism and Iraq must seem like a different world.

This small thing, this ONE sentence, was like an entire chapter in my book of global understanding.