Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between people, and societies worldwide are becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse. Since we started this project, we understood that friendship doesn't choose countries or people and sometimes our long-distance friends are the best ones.
Having friends from other cultures and countries gives us more knowledge about their traditions and helps us to understand people from different races and ethnicities and grasp their uniqueness. There could be several things in their culture that are different from ours and it is not always that we agree with them, but we learn to be more open minded. This makes us broaden our horizons and get away from a particular mindset.
We met through this exchange project. We started exchanging letters; our first one was about ourselves, telling each other who we were, where we lived, our gender, our age and also about a celebration in our countries that we had in December, explaining what we did with our families and what we ate, and the second one was about our country traditions, monuments, important people and gastronomy. After the letters, we found each other on social networks so we started talking there everyday and that made our friendship stronger, and that’s when we started to learn more things.
You may be asking if we didn’t have some communication issues. Well we had the luck to have the same time zone, so when we talked on social media it was easy. But when we exchanged letters, sometimes we didn’t understand each other’s handwriting but with some effort we
understood what the other one was trying to say. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate with each other, even on social media, because the only language that we have in common is English and this is not our native language, so we make some mistakes and then it’s hard to understand. We once did a video call and it was a little weird but an amazing experience, it wasn’t hard at all to understand each other and when the other one didn’t understand, we tried to say it in different words and ways and making gestures so it would be easier. But, you know, with our friends that we talk to and see everyday, we don’t learn these amazing and incredible new things that we learn with friendships from other cultures.
We agree that we loved this project because through it we have learned not to judge people based on their looks and their cultural values and that it is important to have a global vision and understanding of the lives and traditions of other cultures. We have gained life skills and we are still learning how to communicate with different cultures. And we know that our friendship will last forever, hoping that we won’t lose contact, and it will probably be better than other friendships that we have. Maybe, we even get to know each other in the future, and have a good time together, who knows?
“True friendship knows no distance.“
Friendship Across Cultures
Clara Mota
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