Saturday, April 30, 2011

Pony Express, the first post.

Welcome!!


I hope you enjoy reading about my journey and preparations to travel to Ghana, Africa. I plan to travel during the 2011 Fall Semester with the BYU Field Studies program. My purposes in traveling to Africa in short are:
  • To learn traditional African dances in an authentic setting
  • To fulfill a dream and desire to experience African culture on African soil
  • To perform research for my senior project as a Dance Education major
  • To serve and build new friendships
  • For cross cultural teaching experience
  • For adventure!!
I will strive my best to keep you in on the dish as I continue to prod my brain and solidify logistics for my trip. But for now I will create a running commentary on the inner dialogue occurring in my brain. I will discuss the questions and topics we ponder on throughout the course of the field study prep course.

Our first discussion took place on Friday and focused around an article titled "What Student's Don't Study Abroad." We discussed the common report given by students who return from a study abroad experience that reflects already imagined, romanticized, and predicted aspects expected of an experience immersing oneself in another culture. We discussed the tendency to use pronouns in the the retelling of cultural experiences explaining what we accomplished, and what we learned about ourselves, completely ignoring the people we met that left an impact on our life as well as many other experiences.

This discussion led me to ponder what I can do to assure I make my time in Africa as unique and worthwhile as it should be. I can discover my strengths and weaknesses in ordinary experiences I have everyday her where I live. There are many more things for me to learn, people to meet, struggles to experience, and adventures to be had in Africa that I want. The discussion helped me honestly admit to myself that I have romanticized my travel to Africa, and have since I was in high school. I've always wanted to travel there, its been a dream, but when asked by the field study facilitators why, I had a lousy answer, "I dunno, I just always wanted to!" but that isn't the worst part, the thoughts that accompanied my statement were "I want to live in the dirt, I want to meet different people and to live like an African." Giving some attention in hindsight to these thoughts and others similar to it I have decided after our discussion that this romanticizing and preconceived ideas has got to stop.

I have no idea how an African lives, who said they live in dirt! That was an insensitive and ignorant thought on my part. I plan to open my mind to accept the fact that I do not know now and will not know what an African lives like until I experience it. And it may be different then the way it is portrayed in movies, literature or as reported by my field study predecessors. To begin this purging of distorted thinking I will try to recognize the romantic notions I've held onto about traveling to Africa. I want to list some of what I believe to be fallacies here but as I begin to think of them I'm too embarrassed to admit I even thought them! And because I know little about what my experience will be there and recalling what has been said I should expect I feel a little confused about some thoughts. Maybe some are realistic? or maybe they're glamorized hollywood fantasies, I don't know, it'll be interesting to find out and I CAN'T WAIT!