Since we've been here, I feel like I've had countless conversations with my housemates about how incredibly obvious the influences of poverty, racism, sexism, and just about any other ism you could imagine are in this country. We have become accustomed to avoiding the people begging for money on the streets, ignoring the catcalls we receive and the sexist t-shirts we see, and struggling to understand the intense poverty we see in the townships and through our internships. In the beginning, I felt that things must just be much worse here, and that we should learn from our experiences to deal with these problems on a lesser scale in the U.S.. The more I think about it, however, the less sure I am that things are just as bad back at home, we've just been sheltered from the poverty, or it has become so normalized that we are no longer shocked by what we see in our own country every day. After all, when was the last time I traveled to a poor area to look at how the residents live, or joined one of their church services? In the semester before I came here, I had my eyes opened to a number of issues that hide beneath the surface of our society. Before a few months ago, I had never considered the possibility of institutionalized racism, or a rape culture, I might not have even realized that racism and sexism are still so present in our society. If I could have gone my whole life without realizing the extent of these issues, what else is hiding below my line of vision that affects people in the U.S. every day? The state of affairs in South Africa may be far from desirable, but I suspect they're not quite as foreign as we would like to believe.
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