Barefoot

I wrote the following essay in response to a mid-term requirement in my anthropology class, "Language and Culture," during my spring semester of 2010. The prompt was, "Pick a metaphor that describes a group you identify with." Though I didn't take it to extreme measures such as my very good friend and roommate at the time, Claire Carter, who for her essay articulated the metaphor of cheese and how it reflects people who can't eat cheese (lactose intolerants, such as herself) but do anyways because of their love for it, I feel that this essay is an unequated way of describing to you the beginning of my journeys and the reasons behind my somewhat ludicrous but rather brave choices I make in my life. How Claire pulled off a passing grade with an essay about cheese that including the sentence, "Just as Swiss cheese has holes where there is no cheese to be found, lactose intolerants’ diets have a cheese hole." is beyond me, but if anyone can take a dairy product and create a full blown anthropological essay out of it, it would be her. I only wish there had been a camera wired into this essay, so I could greedily watch the reaction of our professor as she read it and realized that Claire must have been drinking copious amounts of wine at the time of its creation, which we were.

But back to my essay. I will simply let it explain itself, and hopefully you can become more aware of and connected to my innate need to clumsily dance into situations that I don't understand but want to be a part of, to fly off on a 9 month adventure without the slightest hint of where I will live or what I will eat, to trust that everything works out as it should, and to accept that signs appear all around us and we only have to open our heart to them.


Barefoot
By Ashley Shenk

Becoming immersed in a culture can be described in shoes. Shoes take you places, protect you, indicate your purpose in wearing them. Take the expat, for example. Heels are the essence of expats. They are shiny, pretty, and formal. Heels take part in fancy events and indicate status within the society. Only the balls of the feet touch the ground, and all else is elevated above it. Expats take part in the shiny parts of the culture in which they live, and never experience all that is part of the life around them. They are limited in their mobility, but they enjoy the status that comes with wearing them.

Tourism is another way in which one can get closer to a culture. Tourism is experienced as wearing tennis shoes. Tennis shoes are meant for comfort. The tennis shoes allow one to walk around, see all there is to see and continue on their way, but yet stay within their comfort zone. There is a barrier separating the tourist and the culture, and the tourist prefers to stay within this barrier of the tennis shoe. Tennis shoes are for continued walking, and the tourist never becomes fully immersed in the culture because they are simply striding through, seeing the popular and beautiful attractions, and continuing on. Tennis shoes protect them from the obstacles on the road, and therefore the obstacles of the culture.

I belong to the group with no name. We are not travelers or journeyers… that implies transition. We are not immigrants… we plan to move on some day. We are the group that wants to immerse themselves as much into the culture as they can; the group that plans to stay and learn and become. I am a part of a group that will live among a new culture and experience all there is, the wonderful as well as the dreadful. The group that is barefoot.

Being barefoot is no easy task. The barefoot person must walk slower, feel all the crevices and pebbles in the ground; we experience all the bumps and difficulties that come with living in another culture in sharper form, yet we can also feel the sand beneath our feet and wiggle our toes in the grass. There is more intimate contact with the world around us, as our bare feet feel everything. Our skin is the only thing separating our feet from the ground, just as our own cultural standpoint is the only thing separating us from this other world. We are fully exposed and at the wrath of another people, another culture. We may hurt more, but we also feel more than people wearing high heels or tennis shoes.

However, the more we walk barefoot, the more calluses we create on our bare feet, making it easier to navigate in this other place. Our fragileness slowly eases away as we become a bit more comfortable in our surroundings, yet never forgetting the fact that we are stripped of our comfort zone, even though we are forming a slightly new one the more we walk barefoot. We are learning to jump the crevices and avoid the pebbles, we are learning where to find the softest sand. We are learning the ins and outs of the culture and are now comfortable here, even though we can never be fully a part of it, we have come to understand it and appreciate it for its quirks and beauty and difficulties. We are barefoot but tough.

And when it is time to leave, we will move on to another place, discover new obstacles in the roads, and feel new warmth on our toes. And we will yet again start by tiptoeing slowly around, and figuring out the best ways to navigate in a new place. We will create new calluses as we discover the joys and hardships of a new culture, allowing ourselves to continue growing and walking barefoot around the world.