High School Musical isn't a True Story

The African Leadership Academy is small and micromanaged, but the students here make it worth it. They see so much potential in their continent, and have such a thirst for learning. Even Francophone students who find English hard are very, very friendly. This is the first time I’ve met people from Lesotho, Rwanda, or Senegal, and we have very different views of the world. I’ve learned that:

1) Fish in Mauritania is expensive, even though the country itself has a huge number of fishing ports
2) Ethiopian dancing has a lot of very difficult shoulder shrugging movements that I lack the speed and control to do.
3) A lot of Africans listen to American hip-hop and rap almost exclusively. To them, Akon is African music.
4) There are cinemas in Nigeria, but not in Senegal. The Nigerians gloat about this a lot. “One day, even Senegal will have beautiful, paved roads.”

In return for these tidbits, I have taught my new friends about the following things:

1) PB&J (all day, every day!). That was actually quite hard, because my roommate, Boubacar, didn’t know what the phrase peanut butter meant.
2) Snow and -25˚C weather. Boubacar thinks it’s cold here and ran around playing football in the sun even when he was fasting for Ramadan. It’s 80˚F every day.
3) WWE is just bad acting, and High School Musical is not based on a true story.
4) Half Asians. Most people here have definitely not seen hapas before.

Although it’s easy to remember fun facts about Africa, names are still hard, especially if the names have syllables you’ve never heard before. Orientation is all about having the same conversation over and over again until all you have is a huge pile of vague memories that involve handshakes, bad pronunciation, and mute nodding. After a while you hate meeting people just because it’s tiring to explain where you’re from.

In my case that’s a complicated few sentences (live in England, went to highschool in the US blahblahblah), but it always leads to the same place. And that place reminds me that what would be considered a racist stereotype in the US is an empirical observation in Africa. This is what I go through five times a day (click on the image to enlarge):