The benefits of friendship across cultures
Self-development
Travelling and experiencing different things greatly affects the personality of the individual, it teaches the person to rely on himself or herself in different areas of life and helps him/her to discover multiple skills, but we agree that it is not possible for all people to be able to travel and communicate with people and engage in this type of experience. This is achieved by engaging in projects with people of different cultures. When we have friends from other parts of the world, we will be able to automatically learn subtle differences through their practices, language, everyday habits and so on.
Openness and acceptance
We have come up with the idea of learning a specific culture and training us on certain things. The only way to learn about other cultures is to make friends with people from those cultures and thus learn habits and traditions that differ from our own. Different cultures may differ from each other and may mean something opposite to our own beliefs. But first we must learn how to understand others and be open to difference. That will keep us away from fanaticism.
Know more about culture
It’s not usual to think of only one culture but if we have multiracial friends, with different beliefs and cultural backgrounds, we will learn about their different habits and we can compare them to ours. As a result, we will go back to our own roots, through which we will not only be able to find similarities and appreciate them more, but also think about the negative points in our culture as well. That will allow us to change our attitude and take the best route, helping to achieve peace.
Knowledge and experience
One of the most important benefits of making friends from different cultures is how much knowledge you can gain. We will learn things about the world, about our environment, about our religious beliefs and rituals. It's not just about increasing knowledge, but getting into these practices will increase our experience. Life experiences like, for example, friendship across cultures can help us a lot in the future, as these activities increase our knowledge, making us people that have no difficulties in understanding other people with different cultures and traditions. This will make people from other communities accept us more easily when we need to move to a different country, for example.
Personal experience
Fortunately, schools and organizations continue to encourage and nurture the spirit of intercultural communication and encourage multiculturalism between students.
The exchange of letters between Morocco and Portugal added a bit of ... We did not find a suitable word to describe it, especially since it was the first time we had an experience like this, so we felt the taste of waiting for the message, because usually we just send messages via social networking sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ...). So, we receive the reply immediately but letters take a long time to arrive and that is the nice part, the waiting! This experience also enabled us to know the customs of Christians for Christmas and Muslims for the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet. We have different religions and these messages helped us to exchange our thoughts and beliefs, showing us that religion didn’t prevent the beginning of a friendship in spite of the different cultures. Indeed it helped us understand and respect each other even more.
The last letter we exchanged enabled us to know each other’s countries (Portugal and Morocco).This message was like a tourist guide describing our countries in order to make the other live an imaginary reality where there are different habits, cultures and traditions from the usual ones we are accustomed to in our own country.
The project will finish at the end of this school year with the activities that we are doing now. We are engaging in a conversation over the Internet to write this text in collaboration and with the help of both our English teachers. We hope to develop this idea in order to include other countries and, why not, travel to those countries in order to meet people face to face.
Although this is the final activity in this project we will stay in touch through social media and perhaps one day we can meet in person and visit each other’s countries. This project made us win a friend for life, that’s for sure!