After every sentence, I believe I consistently said “Oh wow it is soo cold!” I come from a landlocked country in Southern Africa and have learned to be accustomed to the Qatari weather and even though I was mentally prepared that it would be cold, I somehow did not believe it. Even though it was not my first time in the US, it was my first time in DC, in the spring too (my first time was at Yale in the summer). 

Our tours that day were very interesting and most of them were material I was learning for the first time. But I did notice that when we spoke about men, we named them. We spoke about Martin Luther King as his name and not as “the black men who…”, Abraham Lincoln was also an individual name and not a figure of all American Presidents. However, When we discuss the women suffragists, who did something as phenomenal as organizing the first march to the US white house (such bravery!) or when we look at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial statue, we see that even though we may historically look to the names, they are not as highlighted. I questioned why the statue had to be a generic representation of all women, I wondered who these women were, by name. So we could appreciate their efforts, one at a time by name, as we did for men.