This weeks wellbeing tutorial was continuing on the second pillar of Protecting against Bullying and Respecting Diversity.

This week we reflected again on Respecting Diversity. Here is an essay written by Matei sharing his thoughts on this topic.

Respecting diversity

In my opinion, respecting diversity is one of the most important aspects of living in a healthy boarding community, as this is a place where we make contact with people from all over the world.

First of all, if you want to build long lasting friendships and meet new people, you need to be open to learn about other traditions and respect them. If you are not willing to be open minded to other’s people cultures and traditions, they might feel like they don’t belong and therefore they won’t enjoy their time with you. However, if you accept them and learn about their different traditions you might realise how fascinating they can be.

Another very important reason why you should respect diversity is that if you can manage to fully accept it and not judge a person for their origins, you will learn about their traditions and customs. For example, last year I had a Chinese roommate and the fact that I was very open minded and willing to learn about his country helped me learn a lot of interesting things. I found out about their traditional foods, about their writing system, about the fact that their government prohibits the use of Facebook in order to encourage local social media apps such as We Chat and a lot of other interesting facts.

By respecting diversity, you will realise that a lot of the stereotypes you heard about some countries are actually false and you will be able to change your impression about the certain culture. You will also make a lot of new connections and meet people from all over the world, making important friendships and maybe even some business connections.

The most important reason why diversity should be respected is because by accepting other people’s religions, cultural values and traditions you also make them feel welcomed and give them a sense of belonging. Imagine you are from XXXX and come to a new country where everybody associates you with negative stereotypes. Would you feel like you belong there? No, because the stereotypes about your country will influence people’s opinions about you.

In a diverse community you will have increased productivity and creativity because some people will see things in a different way than you because of the way they were raised. They might have solutions to some problems that you didn’t even think about and they will have a wider range of skills. By spending time with somebody from a different background, you will learn some basic words from their language and valuable skills.

If you want to respect diversity but don’t know how, my advice is to try to talk to the next person with a different origin and background and ask them about their customs while also sharing some of your traditions. In my opinion, this is the best way to start a friendship in an international community and trust me, you won’t regret all the facts you learned about their culture. Maybe one day you visit the country that you learned about and instead of wondering around clueless, you will know what food to try out, what places to visit, what is considered rude or offending and you might even be able to put in practice the language skills you acquired by socializing with other nations.

In conclusion, I think having a wide variety of friends from all over the world is one of the best advantages of living in an international community because when you meet new people you basically open up your whole world and expose yourself to so many opportunities and life experiences.