Studying abroad in college, at least at Marist, is borderline cliché. Once junior year creeps up on a student, they usually pick a country in Europe and they’re set.
Mindy Reed, a senior double majoring in English and secondary education with a psychology minor, made a different choice than most of her classmates. When she decided that she didn’t want to go to “Marist in Italy,” she knew she was going to Africa.
“I thought about going to Africa when I was a sophomore,” she said. “I didn’t decide until I was a junior.”
As it turns out, this was a brave decision for Reed. Initially, she was going to go to Italy, but only out of convenience from her fear of long plane rides. However, she braved the long flight to South Africa to see a country that seemed so backwards to a U.S. citizen.
She wasn’t prepared.
“I don’t even know what I was expecting because I was so anxious about leaving home,” Reed said. “I realized how dumb I was about things in South Africa, I didn’t even know who their president was at the time. They were having elections while I was there.”
Technically, South Africans didn’t know who their president was either. In South Africa, a party is elected and that party will pick the leader. The African National Congress is the leading party and Jacob Zuma now acts as “president.”
“I expected that it [South Africa] would be really beautiful; I probably expected it would be more beautiful than it really was,” Reed said. “It’s a place of contradiction. Some people are so, so, so rich, and then some people are dirt poor, living in a tin shack. And I didn’t think I was going to see as much of it because I was on an abroad program, I thought I’d be taken care of and out of it. I thought it would be different.”
Where there are places of such stark contrast, there’s tension. In America there is a large middle-ground where things are taken for granted.
“Walking around with my cell phone out here it’s a way to protect yourself almost, there, it’s the first thing to do to get jumped,” Reed said. “A lot of people’s houses got broken into. My best friend got held at knife-point for her camera. The sad thing is that’s pretty common.”
Aside from getting your technology stolen, having it simply not work was common there as well.
“The technology is still so slow there,” she said. “In the library the printers would shut down, everything would shut down and it’d be that way for hours. It just happened, people would be ok with that. If that happened here, there’d be anarchy.”
Reed’s first exposure to the poverty of South Africa was when her plane landed. She said she had to drive past miles of shacks made of mud and tin and even cardboard. Then, on her first night as well, she stayed in a hotel where she could see a family living on the hill by the building.
“One day, we drove by it [the shacks] and there was a fire,” she said. “The whole thing was on fire. It was devastating – thinking about the people in there.”
People would constantly ask her for money, but the program advisors said to not give any money because most of the people were on drugs. She described the guilt as something “you just get used to.”
Of all of this, however, Reed said classes were the worst part of her experience.
“The classes were over 100 people each,” she said. “It’s a huge lecture and it’s so different from what I’m used to. I never wanted to go to class – I never did go to class.”
But South Africa, according to Reed, is a place of contradiction and contrast. There were good things too.
“I took African dance – that was amazing,” Reed said. “The person who taught it was this really amazing dancer ever. It was crazy what he could do with his body. He was really hard on us too.”
Reed threw up after the first class. They were doing so many exercises and she was drinking so much water that she got sick.
“That was the one class I really pushed myself through cause I really wanted to take it even though I was puking after class.”
Reed said there were some lecture aspects to the dance class as well where the teacher would give a cultural background to each dance.
“He had this tattoo on his arm that was the shape of Africa and there was a big black fist on it,” she said. “I’d seen a couple people with that too. I think it was some kind of anti-apartheid symbol. That was the best class I had. I never skipped African dance. I skipped the other ones quite frequently.”
She was upset coming back to Marist. Not that she dislikes Marist, but there is really no place and no way she can really share her experiences. Publications like “The Globetrotter” come out once a semester and reflect the more popular study destinations.
When people home asked her “How was Africa?” Reed didn’t know what to say. How was she to answer in just a few sentences?
She said she misses the noise.
It’s modernized there [Cape Town],” she said. “It sounds like NYC, even though it’s not NYC there are people beeping and blasting music outside your house.”
Language was another background noise. South Africa has roughly 11 national languages, not counting other native tongues that people may be speaking.
One day, Reed heard a strange clicking noise and wondered what it was. Then she realized it was two men speaking Khoesan, a version of the indigenous African click languages.
“I miss their clicking,” Reed said.
