Blog Post 3 - GH

My homestay mom, Linda, has had the greatest impact on my program experience. She embodies the service we are learning to define and defies the definitions we and others have preemptively created. During our first week in Zambia and pre-departure seminar, I observed a major overlaying theme of entrenched patriarchy contributing to a lack of opportunities in education and formal sector work for women, compounded by a heavy burden of unpaid care work. I had mixed this theme with my own mother’s experience in the US, forming assumptions about Linda’s life that her real experience challenges. My parents immigrated to the US where they both got their Master’s degrees. However, as my father finished his PhD program, my mother dropped out of hers—overburdened by the responsibility to care for three kids in a cultural background and circumstance where men did not contribute to childcare and household work. While Linda still covers the majority of the gendered role of care work, she defies the feminization of lower education and informal work status that occurs in both Zambia and the US. Linda has three children aged six years, four years, and two months. She is about to complete her three months of maternity leave from her full-time job at Zesco—and she just finished six classes for her degree in public administration midway through our homestay period.

Linda’s lived experience demands that others view her within her own frame as a successful student, a confident career woman, and a dedicated mother. She accomplishes this all while exuding an amazing capacity for caring that extends to her three children, her husband, herself, and even two strangers newly staying in her home. Every day I came home from work exhausted, I knew that Linda was far more tired than I was and she still sat down to ask about my day, never forgetting where we left the conversation last night. Linda exemplifies the service that Tine spoke about, especially when participating in service as seeing others and as receiving. She serves us by working hard to see us in our own frames—asking about our families, our upbringings, our values, our experiences and taking away a clearer perception of us than many people who have known me far longer have been able to. She helps us do service in seeing others by showing herself in her own frame, by making it easy to receive the knowledge and experience that she shares.

In many ways, Linda is able to do what many Cornell students cannot—present ourselves convincingly and unwaveringly in our own frames to others to demand that others see us as their service to us and our service to them. She takes the time to care for herself, to ask her older children to help take care of the baby so she can study or to sit down every day and tell someone about her day. In this process of self-care, Linda assures that others will see her outside the boundaries we preemptively set about a woman’s place in society. The result is an assurance that she will always be true to herself and that she will always be serving others through this process. I hope to do a better job of this throughout this summer and especially when I return to Cornell. In an environment where it is difficult to be vulnerable, it is important to remember what we define as our own frame—to not close ourselves and others in arbitrary boundaries.