Cultural Diversity

For the past few days, I have been walking around UCT campus, going to class and experiencing Cape Town at its finest. I never really stopped to think about all the different people and things that were going on around me until just yesterday. Diversity is all around me. As I walk to school, as I walk around campus, as I sit in class. There are all different types of people surrounding me. Different races, different ages, different ethnicities, and different backgrounds that are all sharing the same country and city of Cape Town, South Africa. Now this may not seem so shocking for other people but for me, this is life changing. Lebanon and Merrimack are not diverse places by any means so Cape Town is definitly a culture shock for this small town girl. So today as I sat on the Jammenson steps of the campus I felt out of place but the same time surrounded by diversity. There I was sitting all by myself surrounded by hundreds maybe even thousands of students who were busy talking amongst one another about who knows what. Now usually I would be in that group talking with all my friends but today i sat there all alone just watching and trying to listen to all the people around me. I have found that in order to be able to talk to people and be part of that mass of "in" people, i have to learn to open up and become more culturally aware and diverse. But i know this is going to be a very hard task.

Luckly I am already on my way to becoming more diverse through a class im taking called Race, Class, and Gender and a CIEE seminar called Living and Learning in South Africa. Hopefully each of these things will help me open up and be able to make south african friends in addition to learning more about the culture. So first this seminar is a new program started this year by CIEE and its a group of about 20 study abroad students who are interested in learning and talking more about Cape Town and its culture. In addition we will also be taking field trips to various places around the city! YAY!! Then there is this class that I am taking. So the class is broken up into 3 sessions: one on race, one on class and one on gender, which are each being taught by three different lecturers. For the first 4 weeks the class is race taught by a black male. So the first day I left thinking hes not very good and i dont really like this class but today was a different story. Today I went to class after sitting on the steps and seeing all the diverse people on the campus and wasnt feeling too excited to be there but i went anyways. So he first started off talking about the evolution of race which wasnt very exciting but i listened anyways. Then for the second part of the class we talked about xenophobia. If you look around the lecture hall to the people in my class you will see plenty of diversity. You have Americans, Europeans, White South Africans, Black South Africans, "colored" people which are people of mixed race, and other Africans who come from other parts of Africa. So as you can guess the topic of race brought some tension into the room. The discussion started with the lecturer asking what we thought xenophobia was and there was some debate about whether it was a belief or an act but nothing too bad. Then he asked if there was a hierarchy of foreigners. This got people all irritated. There were plenty of discussions across the room talking about how the police treat foreigners, how people treat south africans differently and how people are still living with the apartheid. So coming from a small non-diverse town, this was a little uncomfortable for me but hopefully as the sememster goes on, i will be able to participate in the discussions and open myself up to race and talking about it instead of letting everything work itself out.
So in the end, cultural diversity has found me and i can only embrace it and learn from it for here on out.

South African fact: South Africa only became a free country in 1994!