Please tell us about your background and interests as they relate to
diversity, and what general topics you would like to see discussed.
What other general items would be appropriate for this conference?

6 responses total.

I've had housemates from different countries.  The first was from Columbia,
a nursing student learning English, where they put popcorn in soups and
salads.  Then there was a Polish English teacher, who played us ragtime music
on the piano.  And the absent-minded-professor-in-training from New Zealand,
who dressed the same all year round (the weather never changed there).  And
a Bulgarian visitor who liked watching professional wrestling on TV.  And we
have friends from China and Macedonia, all good cooks.  This is one of the
advantages of living in a college town, besides the internationally oriented
lectures and performances.  The whole world comes to us.  But these are only
the people who have taken the initiative to some here and assimilate this
culture.  They make me aware of the breadth of diversity, but they are
probably closer to my norm than even most people in this country are.  I think
what I am learning is that individual differences far, far, far outweigh
cultural differences.

This response has been erased.

Excuse expurgated and scribbled #2.  I managed to enter a response to the
wrong item (as a FW, shame on me!).
        My educational background in diversity includes a few semesters of
botany, and an audited course in biological anthropology, where we tested our
blood groups and took fingerprints.
        I was also a linguistics major, and you can't get far into languages
without realizing that the cultures also differ.  I enjoy meeting people from
all over the world, as well as all different backgrounds in this country.
        I lived for two years at the Ecumenical Capmus Center INternational
Residence on Church St., and had roomates from Taiwan, Japan and India.
        And I was a foreign student at summer schools all over E. Europe (where
I had roomates from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Russia, and met other
linguists from Japan and W. Europe).
        I spent a few years as a grad student learning languages and doing
dissertation research in former Yugoslavia, both Serbia and Macedonia, and
discovered that they are highly diverse.  I had an ethnic Hungarian roommate,
mixed Serbian-Albanian and Bosnian-Serbian friends, a landlady from Albania,
and visited Slovaks, Aromanians, Bulgarians, Gypsies, Turks.....  These groups
tended to have rather ridiculous stereotypes of each other, but I had thought
they were all managing to get along okay.

I had met a lot of people from whole world, i discoveried that the differences
are motivations to we go ahead on the road of knowledge and not to make wars
like the human been are doing.it is so interesting i live in Brazil and i
made american,english,sweden,chinese,japanese,french,indian...friends from
whole world and i never went out of Brazil.the cultures on begining seems a
crazy thing but with the time you go understanding that every people every
country every nation have your manner to explain your feelings,but all
cultures every people has a common point and this point is LOVE don't have
a person inthe world that don't have love and i think that with
love,forgiveness...and other good fellings we can understand each other
without prejudices i live in comunity without conflits.we can make a better
world if we have love and if we believe on it. 

Hi, Alexandre.  It made me happy when I read what you wrote.  Do you think
that the internet is helping people to learn that differences between cultures
are not very important?  I think that there are bigger differences between
people in the same culture, than there are between the average persons in two
different cultures.  Where did you meet people from so many countries?

I am Febag. 

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss