I am so so so grateful for these blog posts because since arriving in South Africa I have had a bajillion thought ruminating in my head that need to be written down (for conversation/discussion purposes but also just so they can take up less space in my head lol). I’m kind of a sentimental dork so I’ve been keeping a travel journal of the people I’ve been meeting, places we’ve seen so far, and the many thoughts and emotions. So, this post will be a bit of a reflective brain dump lol.
Coming into South Africa I was immediately confronted with the fact that Yale and America would be the dominant positions from which I would be perceived and just operate here in general. It is no secret that I’m experiencing this country on the dime of my billion-dollar institution. There’s insane wealth (to my standard) written all over the spaces we occupy, the treatment we receive, and the experiences we have made so far. It is something that has been extremely difficult for me to reckon with as my first time in Africa, a place that holds centuries of my family’s history, is one marked so heavily by privilege. It is both humbling and internally conflicting. To grapple with my identity as American but also as a Liberian, as an FGLI student but also attending one of the most elite universities in the world has been incredibly tough. I just can’t put my finger on how I feel about it all, and it is still so surreal to me.
A running joke is that we are in the Calabasas of South Africa, in an area that I could not even dream, in fact I fear, of experiencing in the states. And one key characteristic of it all is gates. Everything is kept in with many checkpoints clearly delineating who is to be inside and who is to be out. And again, I am hit with this internal collision because I am used to being on the outside of the gates, on the other side of the white picket fences and country clubs and fancy boat clubs. My family could never even dream of their child experiencing this kind of wealth existing on the same continent they fled war from. It is foreign to me in so many ways, but I’d say there is beauty in the opportunity to be let in the gates, and for that I am grateful.
Yesterday after we went to Apartheid Museum, I was simply overwhelmed by so many emotions – markedly an overwhelming grief, as I watch yet again the painful atrocities that have fallen and continue to fall on those that look like me. It’s not something I can really articulate or explain but it was in a category of pain that truly hurts like nothing else (along with horrors of the Middle Passage and all the trauma that has continued for Black people in America to this day). Yet amidst the internal confusion and tragic sorrow that I‘ve experienced in South Africa, there is joy. There is an indescribable beauty in the people that I’ve gotten to meet here – ones that I start my day with at breakfast and end the night with at dinner. There is a kindness here that I’ve rarely experienced in the US, and it just brings a smile to my face as I think about it. Today was a very rough day for me personally- just the usual pre-med, I have no idea how to navigate the world I’ve come to occupy crisis breakdown ya know. But one conversation with Fillitah (one of the workers at the lodge we are staying in) turned my entire day around and meeting her daughter at dinner was the icing on top of the cake.
The people I’ve met here remind me of home and they just feel like family. And for now, that’s what’s keeping me grounded as I navigate it all.
