{"id":4140,"date":"2015-10-28T19:37:32","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T23:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2015\/10\/28\/taking-time-to-see\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T14:43:58","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T19:43:58","slug":"taking-time-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/taking-time-to-see\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sarah-matthews2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve already won the most important game of their lives, but most Americans didn\u2019t even know they were playing.<\/p>\n

There are a myriad of reasons sociology professor Kristy Maher, Ph.D., has been directing Furman\u2019s Africa study-away program since 2009, but exposing her students to this reality is near the top of the list.<\/p>\n

\u201c(They) have had what I call the womb lottery, the luck of where you happen to be born that dictates the condition of your life in a way that I think 19-to-22-year-olds in the U.S. who come from fairly privileged backgrounds sometimes don\u2019t understand,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to walk away from that home stay in northern, rural Namibia and not say, wow, that could have been my life if I was born somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Furman offers many opportunities to travel abroad, but few wash away comfort zones as thoroughly as this biannual trip to the second-largest continent in the world. For nine weeks, selected students are immersed in the countries of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and, briefly, Zimbabwe, air-conditioned cars on smooth roads replaced by hot feet and dirt; squirrels foraging below stately oaks giving way to elephants ambling on vast, shaggy plains.<\/p>\n

Instagram reality dissolves back into reality reality, and much of it, like Victoria Falls and Giant\u2019s Castle in the Drakensburg Mountains, is as beautiful as anything there is to see.<\/p>\n

Much of it, however, isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cLots of people every day watch the latest crisis (on TV) . . . but it\u2019s an entirely different story when you meet somebody that\u2019s actually dying of HIV and drug-resistant TB, because you hear the coughing, you see how skinny they are, you can see their bones through their skin,\u201d says Hilary Taylor \u201912, a veteran of the 2011 trip. \u201cIt\u2019s not just information. It becomes personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of Africa isn\u2019t dying in a ramshackle hospital, of course, but day-to-day life is just as eye-opening. Nothing, in fact, generates more feedback than when the students pair up on three different occasions for home stays with local families.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first one is the first weekend there,\u201d Maher says. \u201cThey\u2019re in Soweto, and I think they\u2019re probably terrified . . . And they go there, and it\u2019s not what they expected it was going to be. That\u2019s a great way to start the program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soweto is an urban area of more than a million people. The next home stay several weeks later is a 180-degree turn toward rural life in Khorixas, Namibia, where your nearest neighbor is a 15-minute walk away and electricity and running water are ideas as fantastic as anything J.R.R. Tolkien ever dreamt up.\"madalaine-doran7\"<\/p>\n

That may not sound like much fun to the average American, but it was a profound experience for Taylor.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou live in a mud hut for four days. There\u2019s not a lot to do, so it forces you to interact with people who don\u2019t speak English,\u201d she says. \u201cYou see the stars every night. You help them out with the daily chores, whether it be milking cows and goats, or chasing down a donkey to hook to a cart so that you can run an errand . . . You start to wonder what if our society was like this. Would we be better neighbors?\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything was utterly foreign\u2014except for the one thing she realized mattered most.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt reminds you that there is a common humanity,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThe last night I was there we were presenting small gifts to our homestay mother . . . and we decided to sing “Amazing Grace” to her in English. Around the second verse she started singing with us in Khoekhoe, which is the predominant language in that area. That\u2019s something I think about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Political science professor Don Gordon, Ph.D., started taking students to Africa in 1983. Initially they spent three weeks in the eastern countries of Kenya and Tanzania, but over the years curriculum got larger and moved south.<\/p>\n

Maher led the latest edition with psychology professor Erin Hahn, Ph.D., history professor Erik Ching, Ph.D., and art professor Terri Bright, who landed on Feb. 3 in South Africa with 20 students. Their first stop the next day was the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, which marked the beginning of a dedicated attempt to expose the group to as much of Africa\u2019s geographical vastness and cultural complexity as possible.<\/p>\n

While the former is surprising\u2014the United States, China and India would all fit inside Africa with room to spare\u2014the latter is perhaps more so.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about trying to break down that single story of Africa, where everybody\u2019s poor or everybody\u2019s got a hand out or whatever it happens be,\u201d Maher says. \u201cWe try to say, one, Africa is a huge continent, and, two, it\u2019s extremely diverse in terms of poverty levels or lifestyles or culture or all sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"kate-causey2\"<\/p>\n

Maher\u2019s work is in medical sociology, and she taught a global health and inequalities course. She possesses other unique qualifications as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy husband lives in Botswana, so I go back and forth between these two worlds pretty regularly. The years I do study away I\u2019m actually on the African continent more than I\u2019m in the U.S.,\u201d she says. \u201cIt gives me some advantage, because I have a greater understanding of how the cultures of Africa work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trip was Hahn\u2019s fourth, and she taught a class on poverty and child development. She\u2019s also grown accustomed to the development of her pupils.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see the difference in them from the time they leave here in January to the time they get back in April,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s not a hard sell to get people onto the trip. What\u2019s more difficult is shepherding students through the process of transitioning back to Furman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassie Chee \u201915 was one of those. \u201cYou see people living off of nothing, and I came back here and I was going my sorority formal and all of these things seem so
\nunnecessary once you\u2019ve seen parts of the world where there\u2019s so little,\u201d she said shortly after returning.<\/p>\n

A Spanish\/political science double major, Chee went on to spend her summer working for Kids in Need of Defense, a non-profit dedicated to aiding children who end up in deportation proceedings, and she is now a victims caseworker at Border Servant Corps. Several other Furman students have returned to work in Africa, including Shelley Martin \u201911, a sociology major and poverty studies minor who is currently in Uganda\u00a0with the International Justice Mission, and Taylor, who was assigned to South Africa as part of her two-year service program as an intern with Global Ministries.<\/p>\n

Currently a first-year Master of Divinity student at Emory\u2019s Candler School of Theology, Taylor says she can\u2019t unsee what she saw in Africa\u2014wouldn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself in this place where it was all very hard to process,\u201d the Columbia native, who majored in psychology with a concentration in poverty studies, says. \u201c(Philosophy professor) David Gandolfo was really fond of saying after every poverty studies class that he taught, \u2018once you know, now you owe,\u2019 and that\u2019s a great challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photos by\u00a0Sarah Matthews \u201916, Madalaine Doran \u201917, and Kate Causey \u201917, participants in the 2015 Study Away in Africa<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They\u2019ve already won the most important game of their lives, but most Americans didn\u2019t even know they were playing. There are a myriad of reasons sociology professor Kristy Maher, Ph.D., […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":15489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,45,42,32,48,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-art","category-history","category-politics-and-international-affairs","category-psychology","category-sociology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}