I’m not ready to go home, but I don’t know
if I will ever be able to say I’m ready. I don’t want to go home and constantly
hear the question “How was South Africa?”, and get used to people not really
caring about the answer. Do you really want me to explain to you how South
Africa has impacted me? How driving by shacks without electricity and without
running water has made me question everything I have? Do you really want to
know what it feels like to tell a patient their HIV test is positive? Or how to
answer a 13 year old girl’s question about how to get rid of her unwanted
pregnancy? Are you curious about how the breeze comes into every cracked
window, every open door while it plays across your mind and makes you relax
into the body of the person you want to be, into those feelings of desire for
the future you want so badly? How do I write about a place that has trouble
changing but is constantly changing my thoughts and beliefs?
“When you begin to listen to someone, you
begin to acknowledge their humanity.” This quote is so important to me because
our United States culture is so fast-paced that we rarely stop and take the
time to listen or even care about how a person answers the question ‘how are
you’, so why should we care about how a person answers any other question? What
I want to bring back to the US is the importance of being an active listener:
actually hearing what someone is saying to you, taking it in, and learning from
it. I want our culture to be full of story-tellers, we need to be able to share
who we are and why we got there, and know the audience is listening and
understanding of what we say. The only way to open our minds and learn is to
listen.
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