Jonesie (Profile)

by Elizabeth Young

Sarah Jones is not wearing socks. In fact, she’s wearing sandals. Usually that would be an unremarkable fact, but it is early February and Sweet Briar College just had 8 inches of snow. Socks are too constrictive, no matter what. The college junior, socks or sandals, is counted among the students who were fortunate enough to explore that world beyond college and study abroad. Sarah spent last semester at the University of Stellenbosch, in South Africa. Using the program to gain a “good introduction” to the continent that not many from Sweet Briar travel to, Sarah utilized a program that no other Sweet Briar student has before. Sarah also studied abroad during High School, experiencing Germany and Italy, but this was her first trip to the continent of Africa. In addition to being in an unfamiliar situation for study abroad, she had little personal experience or education with the specific country’s history or political situation before she left. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, the government in South Africa enforced legal racial segregation. This period was called Apartheid. Sarah indicated that much of her knowledge of the infamous Apartheid that so defines the nation came from a fictional made-for-TV Disney movie called The Color of Friendship.

Despite this limited previous experience, her feet-first attitude led her through a semester of new experiences. She attributes this sense of adventure to her time with SWEBOP, the Sweet Briar Outdoors Program. Even if she did not prepare for her trip to South Africa by researching the nation, she was given advice for her trip and used her extra-curricular activities to help prepare her. Sarah said, “To work with SWEBOP you need a sense of adventure… Also, my hygiene standards were relaxed, which was helpful [in Africa].” This sense of adventure led her beyond the college experience in South Africa to safari, where she was charged by a rhinoceros and also charged back, and off the highest bungee jump in the world. Within days of each other. The casual attitude exhibited as she relays these anecdotes is characteristic of the girl whom friends call “Jonesie,” and her attitude extends to the so-called safety issues of living in South Africa. Saying she “never felt consistently unsafe,” Sarah dismissed the possibility of being murdered to a higher probability of being mugged, raped, or otherwise accosted non-fatally.

In explaining her life in South Africa, though, she admits that her experience was drastically different from the lives of people in townships, accounting for her sense of security in the foreign nation. Friends of hers went so far as to insist that she lived in “Fake Africa” for the semester, not experiencing the continent at all. The consistent access to food and water set her apart from the poverty-stricken sections of towns that she rarely visited. Sarah disagreed, knowing the trip was supposed to mark the beginning of the African Experience and insisting that it was the perfect place to get accustomed to the possibilities Africa holds. It does seem a shame that she was unable to spend more time in the more decrepit parts of town, a fact she laments.

That’s not to say she was 100% taken care of; she was required to think on her feet, another trick that she developed through SWEBOP. From forming clotheslines out of belts to developing her own AIDS awareness programs, not to mention an improvement in her cooking ability, Sarah had to get creative with her resources. It could be taxing, for someone used to the comforts of Sweet Briar, and homesickness was not absent. “There were a lot of days that I didn’t want to be there, and missed home. It’s okay to not have a good time, all the time,” Sarah insisted. The benefits of her time in South Africa were worth whatever disappointment Sarah had with her living situation and homesickness. Her work with HIV/AIDS, specifically, was important for her education. “The work we did with HIV was funded by US Aid and being able to create those programs with NGO funding is a valuable experience.”

But does she wish she’d gone anywhere else for her study abroad semester? The answer was a categorical, “No.”