God Grew Tired of Us

This week in class we watched the film God Grew Tired of Us. The film is a documentary of the lives of several african men that are refugees from Sudan. Many of them lost a lot of family members and endured great hardships to survive. Years later, many of them were given the chance to leave their hometown and go to America. Yes to you it might seem like adjusting to American life would be easy, but for these African men it was a hard struggle to get used to American society. One example was the whole concept of "time." In American society "time is money" and is how Americans fit so many things in their schedule at once. But when the African men were explaining their plans to leave Africa one of them said, "We will leave in the morning...or maybe not...but we will leave at some point." This shows how other cultures don't value time as much as American society does. I thought this was very interesting because I was not aware of this before watching this film. Another thing about the film I thought was interesting was the escalator scene. In our social construction of reality, riding an escalator is such a norm we don't even think twice about it. But the African men were so overwhelmed with the idea of it and were almost falling over when they were getting on and off of it. This film really showed how social construction of reality, sociological imagination and social mindfulness play a key role in our lives and we should be more aware of other cultures.