Blog

by Joneka Percentie

I’m leaving the country for the first time this weekend and I am a mess in every sense of the word. These last few days before my departure I’ve felt a strange combination of anxiety, excitement, and confusion. I’m getting on a plane flying across the equator and landing in the southern hemisphere to study at a South African university for three weeks.

I have no idea what to expect once I reach the Western Cape of South Africa. My general approach to life is to set little to no expectations for things so that I am always pleasantly surprised. This will be the farthest I have ever traveled away from home, and so many have told me it will be a life changing experience. Right now, I’m just preoccupied with how I’m going to fit all of my belongings in my suitcase.

The extent of my knowledge about South Africa comes watching the movie The Color of Friendship (possibly the most important movie to come out of Disney channel), singing along to Sarafina!, and listening to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. But now I am actually going to South Africa in real life and I’ll have to ditch my preconceived ideas of the country and its people.

This is an opportunity I never thought I would have because 1) my family could never afford the high costs of international flights and 2) because I’ve had difficulty dealing with my anxiety away from home. Thanks to a scholarship program this summer and reconciled fears about being away from my support system, I will have the chance to study South African women’s health, sexual and reproductive rights.  

I’m not exactly sure what it will be like to live and study in South Africa. Like I said before, I make it a goal to set very little expectations. Although the bar is set pretty low, I never thought I would be studying at a predominantly white university, or travelling as the only Black student from my home university on my specific track.

It also doesn’t help that at least twice a week for the past month my mom excitedly barges into my room with the latest reports from the news. “Did you hear about the girl that got mauled by a lion? She was in South Africa. Don’t go near any lions,” she told me early one morning. Or when she shared this very scary study that found that women that study abroad are five times more likely to experience sexual assault.

In preparation for this trip, I’ve also had to mentally prepare myself for encountering anti-blackness, something they didn’t go over at our orientation. In the past I’ve been guilty of romanticizing foreign countries and imagining them as a sort of utopia or refuge away from the racism in the United States. But in confronting reality, I’ve realized that anti-blackness is universal, and I’ll have to be prepared to experience prejudice no matter where I go. I’ve been thinking over and over about how I may encounter familiar symbols of hate and racism thousands of miles away from home. I’m still working on striking the right balance between being aware of the risks and obsessing over every little thing that could go wrong. I hope to find this balance soon.

With all my nerves and anxieties aside, I am truly excited to see what this trip will hold. Who knows what’s going to go down! I hope to blog about my time there and document all of my experiences, good and bad. Hopefully this is the first of many trips abroad filled with friends, family, and adventure.