A surprising thing happened to University of Colorado at Boulder senior Matthew McAllister when he traveled abroad to South Africa to learn about that country's culture. He ended up learning a lot about his own country too.
McAllister, a political science major and economics minor from Louisville, Colo., traveled to South Africa this past May as part of a program called "Reconciliation and Diversity: The South Africa Model," which was offered through the Study Abroad program on campus. The Norlin Scholars program on campus funded the trip.
He spent three weeks in Johannesburg and Cape Town with nine other CU students and CU-Boulder faculty members Alphonse Keasley and Joan Gabriele learning about the country and how it is attempting to move away from past inequalities. They attended lectures and toured the cities and surrounding areas to learn about the culture and to get a glimpse of everyday life in a country that isn't too far removed from apartheid.
"A lot of times when we went on a bus around Cape Town, we would comment on how much it looked like the United States," McAllister said. "It's amazing how few differences there are on the surface. It felt like we had taken a two-day-long nap and when we woke up we were in the same place."
But once they left the city, they experienced big differences. In the city centers there are ritzy nightclubs, gated neighborhoods and limousines. But outside the cities there are crowded shantytowns where people live in unrelieved poverty.
One day they visited the township of Langa outside Cape Town. A local tour guide showed them around the town, which has an unemployment rate of more than 40 percent. For McAllister, who is interested in working for a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization after he graduates, this was the part of his travel abroad experience that really hit home. It illustrated just how enormous some of the world's problems are and how difficult it will be to solve them, he said.
"Being in South Africa was an eye opener for me, because there is no way a single nonprofit can help when a country has 40 percent unemployment," McAllister said. "The Great Depression didn't reach anywhere near that level. Their poverty is far worse than anything we've ever experienced here in America."
While the trip didn't change his plans or goals for working at a nonprofit, it did educate him.
"One thing this really reinforced to me is that societies are much, much bigger than any government or nonprofit organization," he said. "It showed me that you can't always solve every problem alone, these issues require mass collaboration from all organizations working on development issues. For me, this trip was a real eye-opening experience that I would recommend to any student who has an opportunity to do it."
He also got a glimpse of the United States from an outside perspective.
"A lot of what you hear before you go is that you'll learn about someone else's culture, but you definitely learn a lot about our country by not being here," McAllister said.
For example, it was clear from every speaker he heard during lectures his group attended that South Africans know a lot about American politics. It gave him a new perspective on America's standing in the world.
"They follow American politics more than we follow any other country at all," he said. "On the flip side, I didn't know anything about the politics in South Africa, and they were in the midst of their elections when we got there. I didn't see or read anything about it in the news until we got there. I just really shows you how significant our country is in the world."
While there, McAllister, who also is working on a minor in technology arts and media through the ATLAS program on campus, shot more than 200 hours of video that he turned into a 20-minute video about his group's experience.
"My goal was to create a video that helps to capture as much of the essence of our experience and bring it back to share with others," he said.
To view McAllister's video visit and click on the videos titled "Process Part 1" and "Process Part 2."
For more information about the Study Abroad program at CU-Boulder visit /.