"If there were two people whom I could have expected to understand, it would be my parents, if only because I had been writing weekly, sending pictures, and recounting innumerable stories. That statement stuck out in my mind because it surprised me so much. It’s not like I can blame my mother; I sometimes had trouble rectifying the fact that Pennsylvania and Malawi are on the same planet, the difference being so radical."
Peace Corps Volunteer 2manychefs in Mali: When my parents came over to visit me in my Malawian village, after a year and a half of letters and stories describing my African life, my mother turned to me and said: “I never understood what it was like until I got here!”
2manychefs ([info]2manychefs) wrote,
@ 2005-08-25 22:57:00
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[Excerpt]
(Wrote this at work today - wanted to practice writing, and had six hours or so to kill. It needs improvement but I figured I'd post anyway)
It is easy to concentrate on all the negative aspects of African life, and in fact our newspapers portray Africa as nothing but a quagmire of war, disease, poverty and death. Unfortunately, very few Americans are wise enough to know that the reality on the ground is quite different. Yes, there is tremendous pain and suffering in Africa, but there is also an unfiltered, authentic quality to life there. The absence of strong central authority is probably odious to some, but instead of complete anarchy, a system arises which may be referred to as “ordered chaos,” and while this system is a source of both frustration and amusement for those of us that come from a well-ordered society, it becomes ultimately liberating because it requires nothing more than interdependence and mutual trust to keep it afloat. African society doesn’t ever function in a way that makes sense to you and I, but for a place so backwards, everything always seems to work out. Africans are also unexposed to a mass media and entertainment industry, ignorant of the world around them, and have therefore not yet traded their sense of community for our obsession with conformity, a liberation unto itself.
You can still witness all this in Africa today during an impromptu chorus that knocks your socks off, or in the sheer unabashedness with which African teenagers will throw themselves into dramatic performances, having never seen a professional actor to compare themselves to. Quirky cultural practices still abound, from women hefting everything on the top of their heads, to men considering the most erotic part of a woman’s anatomy to be not her breasts, but her knees. One Malawian friend refused to believe that our government issues a birth certificate to every citizen in order to better keep track of them.
When my parents came over to visit me in my Malawian village, after a year and a half of letters and stories describing my African life, my mother turned to me and said: “I never understood what it was like until I got here!” If there were two people whom I could have expected to understand, it would be my parents, if only because I had been writing weekly, sending pictures, and recounting innumerable stories. That statement stuck out in my mind because it surprised me so much. It’s not like I can blame my mother; I sometimes had trouble rectifying the fact that Pennsylvania and Malawi are on the same planet, the difference being so radical.
