Heritage

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Originally uploaded by UAE_Spirit.

" I am eager to experience a new culture and be open to understand those differences that exist. I don't want to base my ideas on assumptions I make up that have no profound ground to it. I want to be an Ambassador to the world about my country and other countries I have visited," a foreigner on an exchange program said.

I believe that each one of us, whether part of the AIESEC experience or a self travel experience, has those thoughts on minds before taking the experience. We all want to live the life of another culture and learn the rituals of a religion in order to build bridges between the two and be able to communicate on a higher level of understanding. We plan our trip to involve a detailed living experience of all those historical sites that we want to visit and an open discussion that we seek to question all our assumptions.


But.....


When we arrive to another country, let's say UAE, we are shocked. We have an image of the country to be a desert where the only means of trasportation are camels or donkeys at times. We believed that each and every family had an oil dwell at home.
But when we arrive, we see that the country is so developed and it's just like other big countries in the world. So now we are more eager to be part of this country and learn more about this vast development it went through and about its people.

"Nice, a multinational country, that makes me feel at home, but... I can't see much of the locals here!! Are there many? and why are people linking Dubai to Burj Al Arab? don't we usually link a city or a country to a historical site or a tradition?" said the foreign.

So here he is in the middle of a country that was once rich with its tradition and culture and now with all those development much is disappearing. The Arabs are known to have very close family ties that unfortunatelly are fading away with the lack of time due to excess working. Plus when foreigners visit the country, the first thing we, locals, want to show them is Burj Al Arab or any other new BIG FAMOUS building in the country rather than our old Dubai and our valuable traditions. We forget that foreigners are more interested in knowing more about our history, culture and have loads of questions to ask; we just focus on showing them the developed part of the country. We don't even give them the opportunity to try out our cloth, our food, our family gathering. If we did, I know they would very much appreciate it, cause you can get the developed part everywhere in the world, it's really that unique experience of culture that matters more.

I remember a very close person told me once, "whenever new people come to visit, my first instinct is to show them the old Dubai for them to appreciate the people in this country."

I hope each and everyone of us think the same way, because the main reason of us traveling is to learn more about other cultures and build bridges of understanding.

CRASH

Every country, religion, group fight discrimination. They talk a lot about the negative effect it has on community, but none listens because one always blames others. One thinks that he is on the right track and it’s always because the other party has done something wrong that things aren’t working out. One just simply finds it easier to blame others than oneself cause then you have to take the responsibility to change yourself which would take a lot of time and hard effort.

Every country, religion or group thinks of itself as being the “BEST” just because of reasons they make up: we have the money, the intelligent people, the religious people, the acknowledged people, etc. But never do they say, we have a multinational community that lives at ease together, or do they? Well they might, but reality says that no country has been able to bring together people of different nationalities, beliefs, and races to live peacefully together where they all seek one goal.

The reason behind such lacking is not the country, religion or race, but rather our own selves for we can’t accept that there are no difference and we are all one. We can’t take that step of making a change in our own mentality that has been fed all those years that WE are DIFFERENT. A simple example would be in the Arab world and I say it with big shame of it. We always as we are now so deadly lazy, think always back of those GREAT days of success in the Era of the holy Prophet. Everytime we meet successful people in different areas of sciences, we tell them about those great Muslims who have started it all. But we never can give many examples of those successful people in our time because we simply lack them. We simply lack this eagerness in life and are so lazy and dependable on others that we simply think that we are the best, just because we were lucky to have this money and be rich in such a wonderful country.

This is an example in the Arab world which I’m being honest and brave enough to say it cause not much people would talk about it and say it straight forward including other people in the world. Like Americans think they are the best country in the world and White people think they are of high statue than those Black people and this goes on to religion and other stupid reasons.

All examples above are not to say that the Arab, Americans, and others are all on the “Black list” but rather to make you aware of the existence of such discrimination within the community itself. So if a country tries to work this out, how can it if the people are not trying to accept those changes and perceive things in different ways.

All of what i have just written about is simply just a small script of the movie "CRASH" that deals with the discrimination issue. The movie is simply Unique and is focusin on showing that we are all human beings and we all feel no matter what our situation is and how much hate we might be carrying.

Allah has said in his Holy Quran, “Allah won’t change a whole community unless we, individual people start with those changes within ourselves.”