Discovering Things at Voices of Discovery

Now that we are four weeks into Voices of Discovery, I'd like to post a little bit about it! For the first couple of weeks, it was kind of hard to get people talk, but we had a really good discussion today.  So, I am in the U.S. Born - International Born group. Today's topic was how people outside of the U.S. view (North) Americans and the U.S.  We started off by talking about culture - Do we feel connected to a culture? In what ways? This led into a discussion of different cultural practices.  Food was an easy one to talk about, but the most interesting to me was how marriages are done across different cultures.  Some of the students in the class came from countries where arranged marriages are still the norm, and it was so interesting to hear about! We are so accustomed to Disney movies telling us that arranged marriages are evil and that everyone should marry for love, but other cultures have been doing arranged marriages for hundreds or thousands of years and totally making it work.  And even though I already knew that arranged marriages are practiced elsewhere, it was so cool to be able to hear, firsthand, from people who grew up in households where their parents were part of an arranged marriage.  I don't know when else I would get to ask questions about something like this so explicitly without feeling like I was being too intrusive.

I'm very thankful to have been able to participate in this group, and in this discussion in particular.  There are so many things we have to learn from other cultures as people from the U.S.  Our perceptions are often through the eyes of the media; to be able to talk with people in an informal group setting and discuss our similarities and differences gave me a totally different perspective on many countries--some that I didn't even know how to spell or where to find on a map!