Cultural diversity as the complementary power of difference
i have been living in poland for about
four years
and today i’m here to share with you a
lesson
on cultural diversity that i had learned
and i hope can be universal
to begin what is cultural diversity and
how would you define it
well i asked this question to people
from different countries and different
backgrounds
and i was able to obtain a wide variety
of fascinating answers
some define cultural diversity as the
people
having different religion race talking
in different languages
living together some said that it meant
the existence of different cultures
and groups around the world having
different beliefs
interests and values
for some it was the people
who have different lifestyles
understandings
and habits because of the way they were
raised
it was the ability to meet at a common
point despite all these differences
and the beauty that prevented monotony
there was one definition that drew my
attention
one person called cultural diversity the
complementary power of differences
during my first year in poland i got to
have
a polish vietnamese turkish friend group
one polish person one vietnamese person
who had been raised in poland
and we a turk who had only been living
in poland for
a couple of months the language we have
used to communicate
was english which was a second language
for all of us
we all spoke different languages as our
mother tongue
we all had different appearances
our families had different religions
and we were brought up with different
traditions and in different cultures
there were times when i joked about a
situation that we were in or about the
topic that we were just talking about
and of course i would have liked my
friends to
laugh at it but sometimes
it was all silence well
to be honest sometimes joke might not
have been funny and that would be the
reason why they didn’t laugh i can
understand that
but at times i was thinking that it was
because
they had misinterpreted what i said
and one day we were planning to meet and
i wanted to change the
schedule time the message i tried to
explain them why
and at the end i remember that the
situation got so complicated
that my polish friend started to think
that we would not be meeting that day
and my vietnamese friend who was brought
up in a very disciplined environment
was mad at me because i had agreed on
the time but was trying to change it at
the last minute
with a reaction like this i believe is
connected with personality on which
culture has huge influence
and i was just reading through the
messages
and trying to write something that will
pacify my vietnamese friend and will
stop the misunderstanding for my polish
friend
to me the message i had written felt
extremely ordinary i had just wanted to
delay the meeting
but i was totally unprepared for the
reactions i got
and back then i was not able to
understand
why all this was happening
as i spent more time in poland with my
friends
i realized that the reason was because
of the differences
in the way we express ourselves and in a
way we
were used to understanding things
just like the expressions we were using
which in most cases did not have an
equivalent in the other language
because i was thinking in turkish
translating it to english and
expecting from a polish and vietnamese
person to
clearly understand what i was saying and
most importantly
what i was meaning
after this realization i started to
develop a
wider thinking style and broader
perspectives
with this i was able to
look at a situation of course more or
less
from their point of view and predict
what would their reaction be in return
and now these kinds of
misinterpretations
and misunderstandings occur less
frequently
consequently being exposed to cultural
diversity
and gaining more cultural knowledge from
my friends about their culture
has transformed my worldview and
i’m genuinely glad that i was able to
experience and
go through this change
and these differences we had did not
prevent
us from being with friends or being able
to share ideas together
even sometimes it enabled us to look at
situations from
different perspectives
in the moments cultural differences can
be so obvious
and this is actually the thing which
enabled me to realize that
i also had these kinds of
misunderstandings or
misinterpretations with my friends in
turkey
even if we were from the same city
brought up with similar traditions
even speaking the same language this
problem might still occur
i see now that culture is
multi-dimensional
we can say a continent’s culture like
asian or european
culture it can be referred to
countries regions cities towns and
this can go on like that till the
smallest formal community in the society
to families
and since culture is the heritage
that remains from our ancestors and is
passed to us
enriched by experiences of our families
well actually every single family can
have
their own culture
and then these people that are brought
up in the different cultures
in different families us
we form the society we live in with each
other
and by living together or being able to
do so
we complement each other
i find this situation similar to a color
palette with various colors
some of them are explicitly called the
complementary colors
and to create a painting you truly need
those hues to be different
so all of these different colors come
together and they create a hole
for this reason i believe cultural
diversity is
absolutely necessary also in our lives
at first it teaches us to show respect
to differences
it makes our lives more interesting
and it actually provides us a
continuous learning
so indeed it is the complementary power
of differences
and think for a second now
how is your culture being complemented
by another
and what are the lessons and points of
views you don’t know yet