Rebecca Florczyk
Personal Essay

I am 4,500 miles away from home, deep in the hot, humid rural Nigerian brush country, far from any major city. I sit in the back seat of our jeep as we make our way slowly along a bumpy, muddy narrow road. There isn’t much to look at; the tall brush is only inches from my face and the road ahead stretches forever. All of a sudden, I spot a young woman, my age or just a little older, carefully but steadily walking up the road. She is wrapped in a flowing blue cloth and with beautiful posture is balancing a basket on her head. Just as we catch up to her, she steps off the road and disappears into the brush. She was there, and then suddenly . . . completely gone from view. Sitting in the back seat, I spontaneously thought to myself, “Where could she possibly be going?” She seemed so sure of her path that I began to consider my own.

After listening to hundreds of stories and seeing thousands of pictures of my mother’s non-profit work with Nigerian teachers and school children, I was finally able to accompany her to Africa in the summer of 2007. I decided to develop a cultural exchange project in which I created a Girl’s Club connecting my American friends with Nigerian girls from a high school in Lagos. I designed a book filled with narratives about the interests, dreams, and aspirations of fourteen of my friends to share with the Nigerian girls. We based our activities and discussions on our snapshots of American life, seeking to bridge the gaps in our experiences and find strength in our differences. In turn, the Nigerian girls created individual books about themselves that I shared with my girlfriends back home.

Seeing that young woman disappear into the brush reminded me once again that I was very far from home. Actually, this reality had become apparent to me the moment I landed in Nigeria. Immediately overwhelmed with sights, sounds, and smells of a place so completely different from my home, I found myself constantly evaluating my surroundings. From snap judgments about strange foods I couldn’t help but think of as un-appetizing, to the snap-to critiques a stranger like myself might make of seeing badly patched and mismatched clothing worn everywhere around me, I found I couldn’t help placing this new (for me) thousands-year-old African bush environment into a comparison with the hundreds-year-old Northern New Jersey suburban world I’ve known from childhood. In a country like Nigeria, people face extreme challenges, so much so that in thinking through the situation I was encountering, it also gave me pause to consider all the aspects of how one grows up in a particular country, with its natural environment, with its built-in social class structure, and—as well—the perception of what “personal happiness” might be for its inhabitants. For hours on end I couldn’t stop imagining what it must be like to grow up in this corner of the world. I couldn’t help but wonder, “how it is that it is.” Coming from a strongly multi-cultural high school experience, I have always aspired to be open-minded and accepting of people’s differences, but my experience in Africa has shown me that it is not always easy to put aside one’s own assumptions.

Thinking all of this through, I continued to focus on the girl I spotted. What was her day going to be like? What was in her basket? Did she have rows of corn to pick later in the day? Would she have a basket-full of peanuts to sell the following morning at a market? Or, did she have a baby to feed? Or a husband? Whatever were her horizons, her expectations, her tasks, thinking about it all made me feel strangely uncomfortable. Why? Chances are, she was content with her life, but did she have a greater worldview? While not sitting in judgment, I began to wonder about her chances for survival there in the brush, her opportunities for intellectual growth, and so on—all based on what I imagined her social class, education, and even her tribal identity to be. Would she travel the world? Would she ever see New Jersey? I suspected there must be common threads between her and me. But what would they be? We are both women. We are both young. But surely, I thought to myself, my choices will offer far more opportunities for me. But is that really fair to her? Perhaps she is closer to the land, closer to time-honored ritual, closer to a surer belief in structure than I will ever be. And so, five months later and from the vantage point of four thousand miles away back at my home, I’m still thinking about her life in relationship to mine. At a deep level, what I believe is common between us is a desire to improve our life. What is my path, and where does it lead? How do I earn the right to take advantage of all my opportunities and help make a difference in the world? Those questions may remain incomplete until I learn more about the paths all young women in the world may take.