Cultural Diversity: Second Meeting

            Meeting up with Ibrahim for the second time was quite a bit different from the first time. For starters, we were both more comfortable with each other so the conversation flowed easier but we also spoke of very different things. Our original plan was to meet up at Yo again, but upon my arrival (10 minutes early I might add), I saw Ibrahim waiting outside of Yo on the bench and he asked if I would mind going somewhere else. I agreed and as we were walking to Barnes and Noble for some coffee, I asked him why he had changed his mind. He then informed me that he was certain that Yo brought him bad luck because the last time we had met there, he had accidently left his wallet. When he returned to see if he could find it, someone had turned it in… minus the few hundred dollars he had in it and some things his father had given him before he left for America. He couldn’t believe that someone would have taken it so fast and I felt horrible for him, it was an awful awakening for him to have to go through unfortunately.

            After the initial unhappy story, we sat down and I told Ibrahim about how my week had gone so far. He was extremely interested to hear about the service learning project I was doing with 5^th graders at a low-income elementary school in Fort Worth. Not thinking about my word choice, I told him the students were “impoverished” and, of course, he had no idea what I was talking about until I told him that meant that they were poor. He asked me a lot of questions about them because I told him that most of them came from bilingual backgrounds where they spoke English only at school and Spanish at home. I told him that most of the students were completely fluent in both languages and he seemed amazed by them. 

            Ibrahim then asked me for feedback on his English and I told him that I thought he spoke very well. He kept asking me what he could improve on and so I told him that I thought the best thing he could do was speak up because the only times I couldn’t understand him were when he was slurring words together because it was too quiet. He then explained to me that he was working on it but it was hard for him because in Saudi Arabia, everyone speaks a bit quieter than here. We then got to talking about cultural differences between his home country and the United States. He said one thing that was really different was how friendly all of the everyday people you meet were here. He was particularly interested with talking to cashiers because he was incredibly surprised that they actually chose to have a conversation with him while he was paying and it gave him a chance to practice his English. In Saudi Arabia, he told me, it was normal for you to hand over your money and leave immediately without saying a word to the other person. One of the other cultural norms that I really stood out to me was one about the friendship between men. Ibrahim told me that his friend pointed two guys holding hands out to him here in Fort Worth and explained that those two men were gay. Ibrahim said that he was shocked to find that people assume that just from looking at them. In Saudi Arabia, it is normal for full grown men to hold hands while walking together as a sign of friendship while here it is completely different. 

            Ibrahim and I talked about many cultural things in our second meeting and it was very interesting to see two completely different views on how a social situation is read depending on the cultural context. Overall, we had a very thought-provoking conversation and I am enjoying learning about how it is to see the world in a different light. Ibrahim brought an extremely different point of view to our conversation which characterized many things that I would consider normal American behavior to be very strange.