So even though school’s been out for over a month and I still don’t ship out to Uruguay for another 5 weeks I have to say that I miss this group and the support and advice we shared with each other. It seems that now, more than ever, I need advice on how to go about getting ready but I’ll manage.
The worst part about being home, and being away from this group, is the closed-minded-ignorance of practically everyone I talk to about traveling. Everybody asks me how stable it is where I’m going and if I’m going to be safe and if I’m really going to try to backpack South America for 2 months and it just seems ridiculous.
Obviously I understand that people do genuinely care for our safety as students going abroad but I can’t help but think of all the stereotypes we talked about. So many people still think that South America is an anarchical, dope slinging, gang ruled jungle and they know nothing of its people, languages, and cultures. A friend of mine recently posted this blog on Facebook and I found it really insightful about our mindset as a country.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/#T1dt7GPeKxHs3dhR.01
I doubt I’m the only one experiencing this because I know there’s more of us that went or are going to South America but the constant nagging is getting old.
That’s my rant about my purely white-upper-middle-class town, hope everyone is doing well in preparation to go abroad and having a good summer! What do you think about the article??
I am happy to see you writing the first post, to realize that the blog is working and that it is giving you an opportunity to share your thoughts and preoccupations. For some reason I assumed you were already in South America, perhaps in Brazil for the Confederaciones tournament. (What an experience that would be, ha?! I bet you would have many people worried back home, if they were following recent news.) I read the blog entry you linked to your post and found it very interesting and thought provoking. I wonder what other classmates think. I feel that he makes important points (in many ways related to the experiences you are putting in your own entry). I do hope, however, that he takes it to an extreme. I understand his critique of our insular attitude, and about the many misconceptions (and plain ignorance) we have about the rest of the world – this, after all, was something we considered throughout the semester. But I also want to point out that I was very impressed by the life experiences and attitudes of many of our classmates this semester (and of many other students I have met, for that matter), and I do want to believe that your generation, despite the issues identified in the link, also has great potential to become active and informed and at least try to push in a different direction.
I am very curious as to other people’s reaction to your post and link.
And, without being extremely picky – because I was very happy with your post – I am going to recommend a new technique to post links in a more elegant way (after all, one of my new personal missions at UMass is to become more electronically literate, and guide students in the same direction ;-) In order to incorporate the link to your actual text, as I did in my post, you can simply select the text you want to anchor the link – in your case I would use “this blog†for example – and then click on the chain icon at the top of the screen. This will open a new window where you can enter the URL. It also asks you for a name for the link and gives you the option to choose whether the link should be opened in a new screen – something I personally prefer.
Muchas gracias por ser el primero en añadir un apunte a nuestro blog. Espero que nuestros compañeros sigan tu ejemplo pronto.
It would have been exciting to be in Brazil for the Confederaciones but at the same time maybe it’s just as well that I won’t be visiting for a while!
I do agree with you that the author takes his points to an extreme and that not everybody fits his description. Our class and many other groups I have been involved with show how open and accepting some of us are and I think that these views can only grow. With new tools like this blog and the integration of 394 into the curriculum it’s becoming more commonplace to educate about other cultures and points of view rather than seeing the world from a purely American perspective. I believe this will have a positive effect on the current and future generations to open their eyes to the rest of what’s out there.