Relationships 1

August 5, 2018 Diversity and global voices, International life, Learning from Others, South Asian Life

People Are Worth Knowing. For The Redbud Post.

We love our boxes. They are handy compartments for our ideas and thoughts. They keep life simpler when we can put people into tidy categories that make sense to us. I traveled to half a dozen countries and lived in three outside my own before I really began to see just how impossible it is to contain people of one culture in our labels and conceptions of them.

After eight months of slowly dipping my feet into the churning sea of my adopted South Asian home’s culture, I’ve barely gotten past the surface. This country is much less diverse than America in terms of a melting pot of many nations. Our white faces draw crowds wherever we go because seeing foreigners is less common than in other more touristy locations in Asia. Yet, the diversity within this single culture is so staggering, I can’t navigate it well enough to place my finger on generalities.

One friend was married at age 13, a common practice in many villages. Another is still single nearing 30, her parents constantly trying to arrange her marriage. This girl covers her head while another wears jeans and a t-shirt. That woman wasn’t educated past third grade and can only write her name while yet another runs a school teaching the language to foreigners. One fasted the entire month of Ramadan and has been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Another casually claims Islam but isn’t really observant. She has never left the small radius of her village. She is one of the few women in the capital city to drive a motorbike. She attended a small madrasa. She studied at the top international school in the country. All of these women are just as “normal” as the next, breaking the molds that try to contain them as women, as South Asian and as Muslim.

A co-worker has lived in this country for nearly a decade and has been outside of her passport country for 20 years. I thought surely she would have a good grasp of cultural norms and so I  looked to her for guidance...

Are you ready to break down your boxes and get to know people who are different than you? Join me at The Redbud Post as I share about the challenges of cultural understanding...