Human Geography

It's strange to think of life any different than what we are living at this moment. The expectations and experiences aren't new. I feel like my perspective on life is very narrow and in my Human Geography class I now know my perspective is narrow. We're not used to children dying regularly, we're not used to not having food, and we're definitely not used to diseases devastating our population. Geographers take populations and generalize about them. Learning about geographic concepts makes people seem like a foreign animal with predictable behaviors. The personal aspect is absent during geographic inquiry. When you begin to think personally about population characteristics, you will realize that the world is different and evil.

Central Africa is where humans originated and migrated from. In Africa, we prospered as a race of creatures and began to expand and advance to use our complex brains. Southwest Asians began cultivation and that spread to Europe where people advanced into full scale communities with imperialistic ambitions. They spread around the world with their advanced weapons and sicknesses that all originated from cultivation in Southwest Asia which originated from people in Central Africa. So why is Africa so far behind? I don't know! Maybe it's their inability to grow food in their environment, but that's not even true. Maybe it's their inability to sustain themselves enough to advance medically. Maybe European colonists ruined all their soil with cash crops. I can't say the answer because I don't know the answer. I do know that children die in Africa regularly and people are ridden with diseases like AIDS and Malaria. Generalizing Central Africa through statistics takes away the true meaning to the individual people. Why do things work out the way they do? Why does a baby born in Africa die while I grow up with amazing opportunities to become well educated? There's something big that's about to be discovered and connected in my head, but the thoughts I have are too many and too complex. There's more to people than a social scientist can discover.