Lost in Translation... and other Rid.ic.u.lous. nonsense

Sometimes when I'm here, I feel like I understand things.
And then, someone explains something to me again, a little slower, a little more simply, and I realize, "ohhhh. I really didn't understand it at all the first time." Which clearly means that there is an unbelievable amount of things that I am missing all the time.
And then, the other day, we were watching a video in my class where the dialogue was in French and the subtitles in English, and the narrator was saying some really brilliant, profound things about the caste system and the social relationships in India in comparison to Western society. And I asked my friends, who understand some English, if they understood what the guy was saying. And they said, "ohhh, more or less." And I thought to myself, "If that was their response, there is no way they really understood the implications of everything that had been said."
And then, in that moment, I really felt what it meant to be lost in translation.
It's like, the words here, yes, I can understand them. But fitting them into a social, historical, political, pop culture, geographic context and pairing all of that with a certain intonation and facial expressions and taking into account the perspectives of the people involved in a conversation is a whole different story.
And, from there, one might begin to understand why I have so much trouble relating my experiences to all of you in spoken words when I talk to some of you on Skype. Pretty much all of you who are reading this have no conception of the foundations that my reality is based on right now, and concepts that we understand as they exist in the United States just do not exist in the same way here. And this reality and its foundations and nuances are, just like in the United States, unbelievably complex.
And I am overwhelmed by them. Never in my life has the confusion and complexities and lack of words and ocean of thoughts swirling around in my mind left my brain feeling so full. Sometimes it feels like, physically, there is no space left in my head to carry out the task of understanding things and all I can do is ruffle my hair over and over and massage my temples and squeeze my eyes shut so I don't have to take in any more of my surroundings. It is the weirdest feeling I have ever felt in my whole life. It is such a physical feeling that results from such an abstract process.
But anyways... by now, if you have gotten this far, you are thinking... "But what is she talking about?! What is the problem?"
And I would like to give you some concrete examples... but I'm afraid all I have are more abstractions and ambiguities and social constructions.

For. example.
In America. "We" or rather, it, is all about: technology and new things and latest vesions and fashionable antything and computers and fast and straighforward and and now or never and fast and on-the-go and multi-tasking and not waiting and squeeky clean and lemony fresh and genetically engineered, pretty, shiny produce and more than anything... progress.
Oh, how we love progress.
(In Peru. sometimes it is a joke to think what petty, trivial, meaningless concerns all of the above are! There is no room to think about such insignificant, superficial nonsense)
And even more than all of that, I suppose... individualism. Individualism! with a capital I and an exclamation mark and the whole-hearted support of everybody in the whole country (it seems). And to go right along with that, Independence. It's like salt and pepper, peanut butter and jelly, Ken and Barbie, those two ideas: Individualism and Independence. Think about it:
Beyonce sings about the independent women, and we have Independence day, and the clothing advertisements tell you to express yourself, and conformity is looked at with a disaproving scoul, and Oprah talks with people who made their own way in America, and everybody has their own, personalized everything.
These two concepts are so engrained, so valorized, so prized, and so expected (at least my brain) that I can't think of a time when I stopped to think.... "Oh. Maybe this whole 'individualism/be independent' thing isn't so great after all." In fact, I spent the last three years thinking about what the hell I was going to do to get out of my parents' house(s), stop depending on anyone, do whatever I want, consult with no one, and deal with the consequences of my excesively individual, independent actions all alone. And, thats just what I did.

And now, here I am.
And I realize:
"Here, you just can't be independent sometimes." Not even if you wanted to. In some places. You can't support yourself no matter how hard you try or how many hours you work. And you can't walk alone at night. And you can't trust anybody. And you have to have people who you can go to, because you don't have authorities you can trust (believe me) or a bank account to take money out of or free potable drinking water wherever you go.
And I realize:
It's ok to depend on people. to have a family you have to make difficult sacrifices for. to be able to support someone else and have someone support you.
And:
It's really not that important assert your individuality and distinguish yourself from everyone else. In fact, it is incredible to think how ridiculously selfish and absorbed and narrow-minded it can be to be so worried about something like that so much.
I guess, what I'm trying to say is that Americans overall willingness to sacrifice for the collective wellbeing of society as a whole is shockingly absent (at least from my south-of-the-equator perspective). I'm not talking about individual people- because yeah, there's people that go and volunteer and do great, selfless things with their lives. But, America's impact here is immense, and few Americans would know it. America doesn't ask, but demands that other countries makes space for its culture, and politics, and stores, and fashions, and ways of life. But how much space does it make for others when they ask the same in return? And when does America take into account the rupture and confusion and conflict that inevitably results from its abrupt, harsh imposition into another region's people, context and history? And where are the means to deal with that?
I'm just saying. In America, the impact of one's actions on other people just doesn't resonate as strongly as it doesn here and the true profundity of how interconnected we all, as humans, living on one, very tiny planet are just doesn't hit home a lot.

Yes. All of the above are generalizations. But what else am I supposed to do? Of course there are exceptions. But how much of an impact are those exceptions making on the collective conscious of the most powerful country in the world? It seems like very little. America worries about America while everybody else. everybody else. worries about America too.

Sometimes I feel like, if I could tell America something, if I could tell it to confront the reality that it is helping create inside and outside of its borders, within the hearts of its citizens and without consulting the rest of the world, I would say that
"It seems to me, that you don't want to talk about it. It seems to me, that you just turn your pretty head and walk away."