2 Weeks Being an American Again

I left my freezing, sleepy village in Lesotho in the middle of winter for two weeks of summer back in the U.S. with friends and family. I can only imagine what I looked like in the airport when I arrived. After traveling for days and with dirt from the village still ground in, smiling and crying at everything. I hadn’t seen my family in a year. It doesn’t sound that long, but living in a rural village that did not have electricity, computers or TV, the pace was unbelievably slow. Since I was back where I had access to a car and a phone with almost unlimited minutes, I was able to fit practically an entire summer into two weeks. I went swimming, ice skating, to the movies, grilled burgers and had picnics. But the best part of being back in the U.S. was definitely being with my friends and family. I was really touched by how far some of my friends traveled and how they rearranged their schedules and lives for me. I was relieved to find that our relationships had not seemed to have changed. We had new stories and new jobs or schools, but we were still just us, excited to be catching up after so long.

I also met with my professors and did some research while I was in the U.S. I compiled all the data from my household survey and looked for correlations. I found some interesting relationships between gender and life satisfaction. Even though (or perhaps because of) all the domestic work that women do, the many hours a day they spend doing chores, they generally claimed to have a higher level of life satisfaction. My village very recently got electricity, and it will be interesting to see how it changes their lives. Electrification potentially may impact women more because of all the time intensive chores that would change. And possibly, women will not spend as many hours together socializing during chores and electricity may negatively impact their social ties in a way that it doesn’t for men. It will be interesting to actually see the relationship and changes between gender equity and development in my village.

After being gone for a year, several things about the U.S. surprised me. How green and leafy everything was. Also how dependent everyone seemed on their phones, which seem to be getting alarmingly smart. And how much of people’s lives were online now, updating everything on Facebook. It seemed to me that we in the U.S. are so wrapped up in our electronics and our digital lives that there must be so much that we are missing. The pace of life in the U.S. was alarming, it felt almost uncontrollably fast. I think that impression came from being away from it all for 13 months, but also that things have actually gotten faster. So many things are instantly available. I miss my friends and family immensely, I also often miss the access and ability to get things done so quickly, but I’m a little scared of returning to that accelerating pace and way of life. Luckily for me, I’m back in Lesotho for another entire year.