Rejecting the Single Story One Chapter at a Time

So now that you've heard Chimamanda Adichie talk about the single story I want to talk about why it's relevant. Why does the single story matter?

When I left to go to Ethiopia I thought I knew where I was going. No, I had never been to the developing world. No, I had never been to Africa. No, I didn't actually know anybody from Ethiopia. But I was well educated. I had attended conferences at Notre Dame with keynote speakers from Africa. I had listened to lectures by Africans discussing the problems in the various countries of the continent. Heck, I had spent this past semester in two courses specifically about African politics in addition to the other courses on Africa that I had taken in the past. I had been reading books, and watching documentaries, and absorbing everything I could to prepare myself to move to Ethiopia. Of course I knew where I was going; of course I knew what I was getting into. I had spent three summers in the Glimmer offices. I had listened to my colleagues' stories as they came back from trips to Ethiopia. I had read news articles on our organization. I had seen the pictures and even made some of the videos for the Glimmer website. Yes, I was ready. Ethiopia may be a country I'd never been to on a continent that I had never visited, but I was armed with a wealth of knowledge that prepared me for where I was going....right?

Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! Within hours of landing in Addis I learned that I actually knew nothing. I had a single story about Ethiopia. I thought that I had acquired a breadth of knowledge about the country to which I was moving and in fact, I had a picture of Ethiopia that was as shallow as a puddle. (And not those puddles on the Notre Dame sidewalks where ducks can be seen diving for food) In fact, I realized very quickly that I had a single story of Ethiopia that was not even country specific. I had made lots of generalizations about the African continent as a whole and when I didn't know something about Ethiopia, I just applied these generalizations. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! It didn't take more than a day for me, like Ms. Adichie on her trip to Guadalajara, to feel a deep sense of shame. My stereotypes about the people, the culture, the government, development, every aspect of Ethiopia just were not correct. My single story was just a tiny and incomplete piece of a much larger picture.

So I want to begin to dissect the ways in which I was wrong. Building on the whole metaphor of the story, I'm going to give the next few posts as "chapters"...they are chapters in a story that is still being written, and which I am continually reading. I'm sure that I've only brushed the surface of things that I have to learn and in discovering things that I had wrong, so hopefully I can share them with you as I figure them out...