Siriomi Reflects » Hear ye, hear ye! The latest from my mind at Siriomi Reflects!

If there is one thing I have learned from my trip to Nigeria, it’s that ethnographic methodologies are to be respected. It is not an easy endeavor to forgo all of one’s cultural assumptions to fit into a foreign culture. Having a father from said foreign culture certainly helps, as he was able to translate, roughly, what everyone was saying. But goodness, it is so very frustrating to not speak to one’s extended family! Even worse, I know French well enough to have a stilted conversation, and the fact that one of my relatives also spoke French, is the only reason why I didn’t go crazy with a sort of odd loneliness.

So I said I’d be unplugging because there was no better way to describe how cut off I would be from the rest of the world. By the end of the trip, we were making jokes about how the Gulf of Mexico probably wouldn’t exist anymore. It’s not like we knew, in our village there weren’t any radios, newspapers, televisions, or Morse Code, now that I think about it. There aren’t even roads.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“So long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The above is a selection from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and is applicable to my situation.