When I was fifteen I got to fly to Canada for an archery tournament, which was super cool for a bunch of different reasons. For one, it was an awesome opportunity. It was also my first time on a plane. But the mega awesome part was that I was going to be able to meet kids my age from not just other states, but from other countries. I’d literally never met anyone who wasn’t American, at least in one way or another. I met kids from other states, sure, mostly Kentucky, but I also met kids from Canada and South Africa and Namibia. South Africa was the only country with two teams. Marching behind the all-white A team was the B team. That was the team all the black South African students competed on, and I vaguely remembered some maybe not-so-old animosities that went by the name apartheid, from a movie I once watched on Disney Channel. The movie was old, which made me think that those conflicts and struggles had gone as grainy and irrelevant as the film, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Later on, I ended up shooting with a kid named Gerhard from Namibia. It took me way too long to figure out how to say his name, but it was just too rude to say the Americanized version he offered me after mispronouncing it three times, and I eventually got it. He too had never gone on a plane before this, and he told me that he turned seventeen twice because of the time change. He lived on a farm, his family was Christian, and he went to school with about ten other kids. After that, I shot with a kid named Johannes, also a Namibian, who insisted on being called his nickname, which was Hannes. He had an iPhone, a massive gaming system back home, and went to a huge private school. He was going to be a pilot one day. They were anomalies to me. But I was an anomaly too. They asked about my ripped jeans, why Americans only speak one language. My handshake was firm for a girl they said, and they’d never heard of girls applying to universities.
I wasn’t the same person when I came home. America looked different to me, and I started to see disparity where I hadn’t once before. The rhythms became out of order, and I started to think about things that had once felt familiar, because they now felt foreign. I started to see gaps and bridges everywhere, everything was a little brighter or duller. Strangers feel less like strangers to me now, and I always pay attention to how people shake my hand.
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