Reflections from Far, Far Away 4

Wed 3/24/2004 10:34 PM

Aim-

Your experiences there are clearly affecting me as I work through the stories. Twice today I seemed to need to process the fact that the (nursery) school – not the university/college – has only recently been equipped with toilets and running water. I've mentioned it to students and found myself saying out loud "Everyone in America (just about) has running water and a refrigerator." Having these things doesn't in any way indicate privilege in our worldview. They are a given; totally taken for granted. I was thinking the same thing about your needing to stand in a long line, waiting your turn at an internet cafe. Here, internet cafes are almost stupid and seem like businesses that are sure to fold for lack of a market.

It's weird, but it makes me think about business opportunities and then I get caught trying to figure out if the impulse to bring something like an internet cafe to people in SA or other underdeveloped areas that would otherwise go without is colonialistic or charitable in a capitalist kind of way. Not that transatlantic business opportunities regularly occupy my imagination, it's just that I hear about the conditions and I think, "It would be so easy to help, so easy to provide when there is clearly so much that is needed there."

I also have to think that if the basics are just beginning to be distributed across racial lines there's no way in hell the gender issue will be addressed for decades. Especially if the power issues are so deeply ingrained in the cultural ways of the people in their everyday lives. Hearing about this helps me to really think about American racism and racial differences that are rooted in history. Of course I've always known that the black/white dynamics are the result of slavery in America, but that is something that we just don't readily acknowledge or openly address/accept. It seems to me that we end up talking about the differences as being a result of economics, psychology, system failures, anything but a long and ugly past that has left real visible and palpable traces on the present. It's as if folks want history to somehow be this rich, far reaching root as a romantic notion but only want it to reach from here forward in actual time. I don't know. I have never pretended to be a historian and so I may be being naive here. Fill me in on your thoughts.

Love you bunches—

Reen