The Definition of Africa

I recently went to see The Lion King musical in San Diego via the Bulldog Bus. While I was there, I thought about how much of what we as Americans know about Africa comes from watching The Lion King and other such media portrayals of Africa. This past summer I had the privilege of going to Kenya for three weeks to serve the people of Kitale, Kenya. When I landed in Kenya, I recognized in myself the desire to see the acacia trees so clearly portrayed in Lion King, and it wasn’t until I saw the acacia trees and the huge black birds that are often in them that I truly felt like I was in Africa, despite the multitude of other clues that could have been used to prove that I was no longer in America. Throughout my stay in Kenya, I often looked for objects like those I had seen in Lion King. I even went so far as to ask the children I worked with if the word “Nala” meant anything in Kiswahili after discovering that “Simba” meant “lion.” I also took a picture of a scene that I like to describe as “My Lion King picture.” This just goes to show how powerful movies, and children’s movies in particular, are in giving people an image of what a certain place is supposed to look or feel like.

Money Money Money

Both “Money Money Money” by Abba and “Money, Money” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rant about the lack of money and the need for it, as well as possible ways to gain money. The singers of both groups are people from groups that are rarely at the top of the socioeconomic ladder: women and African-American men. Thus, both groups want to do what they can to better their economic position, though they propose different methods and express themselves in different ways. The Abba singers intend to marry rich so that they don’t have to work, enabling them to live carefree lives. They imagine that the world is a better place with more money, and that the sun would even shine brighter on the rich, which is what they desire for themselves. They talk about money “in a rich man’s world,” and in this world, it is often correct to say that white males are normally the highest paid, so that it really is a “rich man’s world.” In contrast, the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony singers mention the negative effects of not having money, of which there are plenty. They cited things such as living in ghettoes, facing discrimination, and robberies. They focus less on how to gain money and more on the lack of money. They do say that they need to work for money, but mostly they discuss the various problems that are typical of a poor African-American community. Money is so important to our society and our everyday lifestyle that two separate bands wrote a song to voice their distress over their lack of money and their need for more of it. Without money, there is so much more opportunity for injustices to happen and take root, and people are forced to do things that they would rather not be doing in order to survive.

The Savage Pocahontas

I recently watched Pocahontas with some people in my dorm. That movie was one of my favorites as a child, but upon watching it again as a college student taking an anthropology class, I was appalled at some of the scenes in this children’s movie. The British people come to the New World with preconceived ideas of the land and people, declaring the Native Americans savages before even getting to know them at all. The governor tells Thomas to kill a savage if he sees one, simply because he assumes that the native way of life is inferior to his way of life. It infuriated me how intolerant of other cultures the colonizers were, so much so that they were bent on shooting a native on sight. The colonizers had so much to learn about and from the “savages,” but they were not even giving them a chance to teach them, so set were they in their own ways and ideology. The thing that bothers me the most about this is that this situation is not one that occurred only during colonization, but it is a way of thinking that is apparent even now as people interact with people different from themselves. We could learn so much from other people, if we were open to investigating varying ways of doing things.

As a child, I didn’t understand the cultural discriminations in this movie that I understood when I watched it most recently. I know that what happened in the movie, in regards to the attitude of colonizers, is essentially what actually happened in the New World, but it still makes me angry that anyone would be treated like that and that people continue to be so ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is something that I believe to be ingrained in most people, but that does not mean that it is right or acceptable, though it is hard to realistically change the mindset of anyone bent on considering themselves better than other people.

Invisible Children Participant-Observation

Victoria, one of the CA’s in my dorm, invited me to go with her to distribute Change-for-Change jars for Invisible Children. The point of the jars is that people put spare change in these jars to help raise money for Invisible Children, a club that fights against the Lord’s Resistance Army and its use of child soldiers in Uganda. I had watched the latest Invisible Children movie recently, but I had never done anything to help them out before. Victoria and I met a few other people in SLIC, where we divided up a big box of already-labeled jars into smaller, more manageable bags that we could take to the various dorms. Victoria and I then took some bags and flyers and trekked back to Grossmont and Fairmont, where we delivered a jar and flyer to every room that opened their door to us and allowed us to share a bit about what we were doing.

I was surprised by how almost all of the doors in Grossmont were closed, which increased the awkward factor as I had to knock on each and every door in Grossmont and wait for someone to answer, rather than the open-door community I’m used to seeing in Fairmont that would have enabled me to have easier access to the people I was trying to talk to. The whole event was a bit uncomfortable for me, especially since I’m not used to going door to door talking to strangers, promoting a topic that I don’t know very much about, all while clumsily trying to manage a flimsy bag filled with jars in one hand and a handful of fliers in the other hand. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, and that uncertainty was noticeable to the people I was trying to talk to, who likewise responded in an unsure manner. I feel like I was very unclear when I was trying to present my message and inform people of the cause I was helping out with, which made me incredibly self-conscious and unconfident in the way I spoke. This is not a part of my personality that I am strangers with. Rather, it is a part of me that I am working on changing to enable me to go out of my comfort zone and do this sort of thing more frequently.

Doing this activity with a key informant made it possible for me to have a better sense of what it was we were doing and how the evening was going to run. Victoria directed me as to where we were going to go, and she instructed me on the key points to say to the people I was handing jars out to. We went to one floor of Grossmont to pass out jars together, so I was able to hear how she talked to people and informed them of Invisible Children. She answered my questions and helped me wrap things up at the end, taking the remaining jars and fliers from me and informing me that within the month someone will need to come by to pick up the collected change and pass out more jars, making this a monthly activity.

Other than the few minutes where I was observing Victoria knock on people’s doors and talk with them, I was fully involved in this activity, doing just about the same thing that she was. Participating in this event gave me a better understanding of the preparation and face-to-face interaction needed to raise awareness and money for an organization and cause such as Invisible Children. If I had just observed someone in Invisible Children, I might not have completely internalized the hysteria of the co-president as she became overwhelmed at the daunting task of knocking on every single dorm room door. I also might not have felt the discomfort of talking to random people while dragging along my rather large bag of interesting objects. By participating in this activity rather than simply observing it, I was able to fully experience what the people who do this on a regular basis go through. I expect that the awkwardness that I felt vastly decreases as one becomes more comfortable doing such a thing as this, or if a person is more outgoing than I am, but the motions are still basically the same.

A questionnaire or survey would not have given anyone an adequate sense of the happenings of this activity, the feeling of going door-to-door, or the awkwardness of not knowing how to respond and react to certain people. A questionnaire or survey could, however, inform a researcher how many of the people contacted would do anything with the jars they were given, or how effective they thought this method to be. A written report could also give statistics on how many people were passing out jars, how many people were previously involved in Invisible Children and thus already had a jar, and how many jars were given out. While all of these things are important things to consider, it is important to get a feel for how an event is actually run, rather than examination of the outcomes alone.

Space and Setting

The space I live in at college has become my home, although I use space in exceedingly different ways here than I do there. My room in my dorm is set up differently from my room at my house. At my house, I have a headboard and drawers under my bed, both of which store the majority of my things and allow me to do a multitude of activities without getting out of my bed, because everything is stored so close to my bed. In my dorm room, I do not spend as much time doing homework on my bed, mostly because I use my desk, which I did not have in my room at my house, and because I often leave my room to do my homework, so as to not disturb my roommate. My dorm room is my sleeping space, as well as occasionally my homework space. I have to walk further to get to common rooms, like the lobby, than I do when I’m at my house. This does not deter me from going to common rooms; rather, it means that I must make more of an effort to get to one. Living on campus also means that it takes less time for me to get to my classes now than it did in high school, since I live at the same place that I go to school. I find myself walking a lot more than I do when I’m at my house, which enables me to utilize space in a more personal way as I have more time to observe and interact with the space that I am passing through on a daily basis.
While there is a kitchen in my dorm, I do not spend very much time there. Instead, I walk across campus, across the quad, to get to the commons for most of my meals. I eat in a large space with a large number of people all the time instead of with my family in my more confined living room. I constantly walk across the quad to get to the other parts of campus, such as classes or common meeting areas, since I live in Fairmont. I do not normally go to the athletic facilities, or that side of campus, since I am not an athlete and I don’t often go to many sporting events as a spectator. I work at a location off-campus, but my workplace is close to my dorm. I do not often go to buildings where I don’t have class, so during the day I mostly go to Lewis, Larson, Hall of Letters, or Gregory, aside from the commons and my own dorm. I do not know yet where some of the other classroom buildings are, and if I never have a class in some of them, I may never visit them, since I would have no need to do so. I generally need to have an express reason to be in a particular part of campus, or else I will not venture to that area. I tend to walk along the same paths every week as my schedule becomes more and more set in a routine, limiting the space that I use to the set paths I tread.