Blog 1: From Our Parts of the World

Hey, everyone! Last week, after having an insightful conversation with students from Dickinson College about their cultural and environmental backgrounds- I got to thinking about my own experiences and considering the different ways they tend to contrast with theirs. Although, like them, I am a university students who has worked incredibly hard to get where I am today, it’s quite interesting to look at all of our beginnings and how they led us to meeting each other.

Growing up in the northern areas of Pakistan, I have always called the mountains of Azad Kashmir my home. Even though I have only spent about half of my life there, my identity has closely been tied to the lush fields flowing from one city to another. To me, being surrounded by nature has always included the sweet scent of purple geranium flowers grown widely in my hometown as well as the crisp air of the mountains. Hence, when I moved to the UAE eleven years ago, it was hard for me to call the surrounding desert my new home. The unbearable heat, the miniscule particles of sand that got everywhere, and the lack of greenery around me definitely took a toll on me.

It was only years later, when I finally began to accept the bougainvillea flowers grown widely around my city, Al Ain, in replacement of the geraniums back home. Overtime, I saw many of the things I valued in my hometown slowly start to fade away- being replaced by the things I connected with in the UAE. When I brought this up with the exchange students from Dickinson, it was good to know that I was not the only one who felt this loss of connection to my roots. One of the students supported me by telling me about how his parent’s migration from their country to the USA made him feel disconnected to his own ethnic roots. We spoke about the fact that reclaiming our roots has been a long and hard journey but one that has been incredibly rewarding.

Interestingly, although we both accepted that universally it is difficult to connect to one’s roots when living away from one’s home country- we disagreed on what impact the your new country has on you. I believe that it is possible for one to fit in culture and values of your new country if you have been living there long enough. On the other hand, he believed that it is still rather difficult to feel an authentic sense of belonging. This may have been due to the fact that both of us had moved to completely different countries from our hometowns, one being the UAE and the other being the USA. Yet, I felt that it may have had nothing to do with that and more to do so with how we felt in our hometowns. For me it was the smaller elements that surrounded me that made me feel the at home. For him, it was such a presence rather the lack of it that may have led him to have a difficult time settling down in a new place.

We ended the conversation on a light note, talking about the importance of having such conversations take place and the need for them to have more diversity. As mentioned in our textbook, “…for researchers, in-depth understanding is the goal of comparative analysis”. Only with such a mindset will we be able to understand each other on a deeper level. That’s all for this week, talk to you later!