How Immersed is Immersed Enough?

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what it means to fully know a person, a place, an idea. Our ThinkImpact phase this week is Immersion. The students do a variety of activities to help in understanding the culture deeply and quickly. Thanks to some ideas from IDEO and a number of other smart folks, our students went forth armed with tools to become Immersed. They did this by watching, engaging and quite literally getting their hands dirty in the daily life here in Clare, South Africa. Some aspects of these activities involved:

• Impromptu language lessons
• Laying the foundation for a house
• Carrying water
• Sitting in on classes at the high school
• Speaking with the owner of the biggest shop in town, and the only Pakistani resident of Clare. [For some reason the first 3 days we were continually told to go to the Indian Shop]
• Grinding peanuts by hand
• Learning how to cook—college aged men, I’m looking at you. Learn it now, the “real world” will not teach you and fast food is both bad for you and not available in awesome rural African villages where you may want to go.
• Endless conversations with villagers asking why we are here. Why Clare?

Beyond these activities though, how can one become fully immersed in a place. Are we meant to get to know a place through its people? the leadership? history? politics? food and language? sport? education systems? economy? transportation (here, that one is easy: feet! and a few terrifying taxis)? religion? Do we need to know what people read? How they bathe? How they obtain food? Do we need to get it under our skin? our nails? In our hair? [the last two we’ve definitely done whether we meant to our not] How deep is deep enough to go?

I am humbled daily here by the growing knowledge of my own ignorance. While I may know parts of Africa better than some, I have barely scratched the surface. These activities have actually helped us to answer almost all of the above questions about Clare—an impressive amount of information for 3 days of program work. The reality is though, without the people who live here, we would still be lost. They are the ones who can tell us what will truly work when we begin to think about creating businesses that could thrive in this sleepy village. Thankfully, ThinkImpact thought of that, and approaches development by including those who are meant to reap the benefit of it. We are all itching to get to the partnership phase of this process and start building business plans, but first, we need to keep digging deeper. We need to know more. And once we are downright soaking wet immersed, then we can step back and start to learn from what we’ve gathered. More on that next time!

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Some quick asides about me and follow ups to the last post:

1. My host sister who started a Long Walk to Freedom via borrowed Kindle has almost finished it. She’s been reading for about 1.5 days. It is over 700 pages. Amazing.
2. In our language lesson today one student said the thing he needed to know how to say most was “You are a genius.” Everyone concurred.
3. 24/7 jobs are intense. Which means, if you are a mom, God bless you.
4. I’m not the only one here who thinks that 50 degrees is super cold winter weather! At last! Maybe I’m African?
5. Around the house I’m now known as “Sister Susie.”