Last look

Toward the end of the summer study abroad program I was leading in southern Africa, the owner of a seaside lodge just north of Xai-Xai,  Mozambique, asked me, “Do your students like the food?”

I was taken aback by Leone’s question. Of course we liked the food, I thought, as I followed her from the edge of the Indian Ocean and over the sand dunes to her office. Why would she ask? At every meal, the 15 students and their five African colleagues who had enrolled in “People, Culture and Environment of Southern Africa” flocked to the well-stocked buffet table, jostling for position at the head of the line to have their choice of the best food Mozambique could offer: fresh green salads, fruit salads, homemade bread, green beans and garlic, boiled potatoes and butter, fried chicken, grilled fresh tuna and beef steaks. The students piled the food high on their plates, just as they had done elsewhere on the trip. Just as they did at home.

“I was asking because the kitchen staff was concerned,” Leone said. “They saw how much food was left on the students’ plates when the dishes were cleared.”

Then it hit me. I had not foreseen what the seemingly insignificant act of leaving large amounts of uneaten food on our plates would say about us as Americans. This comes from someone who had worked and lived in the region for more than a decade, spent years locating African partners for research, developing joint agreements on ethics and protocols for collaborative research programs, preparing courses and service learning activities and finding inns, lodges and restaurants with friendly staffs that catered to Western tastes. I had also spent considerable time before the trip on cultural sensitivity training to prepare the 13 undergraduate students, two graduate students and one U.Va. alumnus for the work they would be doing in southern Africa, the conditions under which they would be doing it and the respectful manner they would need to employ to implement it.

But no matter how much the students said they “got it,” their thoughtless act betrayed their lack of understanding of southern Africa, its people and their cultures. Their wastefulness made us all ugly Americans.

Later that evening, I shared my conversation with Leone with the students. I asked them to reflect on the incident and what it meant. Some students questioned the importance of the exchange given the context of the program. “But we came here to study!” said one student. “We’ve come to help them,” said another.

They wondered how it was possible that their new African acquaintances would think they were wasteful and arrogant just because of that seemingly unrelated action. Further discussions that night and in subsequent days showed that the students did not mean to be insensitive and that being perceived as insensitive pained them. Still, they had brought considerable cultural baggage with them. The voices they were responding to were complex and ingrained: “We are not going to eat all that stuff” (because it’s foreign and we’re not sure what it is); “Don’t worry about wasting food, there’s always more” (we live in a culture of plenty); and “You don’t have to eat the food if you don’t want it, just leave it on your plate” (life is full of choices, you can try whatever you like, just be polite about it). These were not the voices that I grew up with just a generation before, that I assumed these students had grown up with as well.

As the students gradually absorbed the lesson, I realized it was not the kind of lesson they would have learned by reading a book or sitting through a lecture. Only firsthand experience — feeling the sting of embarrassment at the incident and coming to understand there was a gap between their sense of themselves and the Africans’ perception of them — could teach a lesson I hoped they would remember for the rest of their lives.

To begin to understand their place in the world, students need to travel outside their comfort zone. Educational travel can do two important things: 1) remove the distance between student and subject, and 2) develop relationships between students of different cultures and backgrounds. Students who are studying abroad are immersed in new surroundings that force them to learn about themselves even as they learn about a new culture.

I will always remember the words, as we were preparing to fly home, of one young African-American woman who participated several years ago in the southern Africa program. “Bob,” she said, “I never knew just how American I really am.”

As an educator, if I achieve nothing more than creating opportunities for my students to look into the mirror and understand who they really are and what their place in the world really is, then I will have succeeded.