English: My Love for the World and its Diversity
The international system has been a sphere that has continued to baffle me over the years. I have continued to wonder what shapes the behavior of nation-states. I love watching news especially on television networks that air world news. Each day there are incidences of nations at war with each other or different nations criticizing each other’s for their actions. I have often wondered how I can bring peace to the world by myself. I am small and helpless in a world that is occupied by over 6 billion people. Each nation defends its actions on the basis of political sovereignty. However, there are nations that claim sovereignty yet they do not have the capacity to protect and provide for their own populations. I believe that every individual in the world needs to be treated equally in spite of the geographic location that they come from.
I have a great thirst of learning more about the world. I have travelled to various countries around the world and I have to admit that it has changed my perception of the world each time. The world is made up of diverse cultures that have great meaning to the people. However, the many books that I read seem to have biases. Western cultures tend to be exalted above many cultures in the East. I believe that there is no culture in the world that should be considered inferior. It is the diversity of cultures around the world that makes the word an interesting place to live and visit. Life would not be the same if we all had the same life values and norms. Economic prosperity of western nations has sometimes been used as the basis of look down on cultures in the East. However, economic strength should not be the only platform that should be used to look at the world. There are other elements of society that need to be considered when authors and people make generalizations regarding various nations and cultures around the world.
My love for other cultures especially in the East has been due to the different structures of society. Many societies in the East are founded on communalism. Each member of society is responsible for the welfare of the other. This means that an individual in society will often get help from other people despite the fact that these people are not related. Due to the communalistic structure that characterizes societies in the East, there is a sense of community in those cultures. Everyone seems to know almost everybody within their community. One of the countries that I visited is Tanzania in East Africa. The level of community in the country is overwhelming. People would often stand beside a road and talk for a lengthy period of time yet those people were not even related. Unlike the haphazard greetings that I was used to in the West, I slowly learned that greetings in Eastern cultures had a different meaning. People did not only want to know about the welfare of the immediate person that there were talking to, but they also wanted to know about his or her family. This culture brought a sense of the importance of each individual in society. Another important element that I learned during my stay in Tanzania was the fact that economic status of individuals did not alter the manner in which individuals related with other members of society. It was difficult to establish whether an individual was rich or poor. This is different from what I am used to in my town. Rich people tend to live in the same areas and visit the same stores. There seems to be segregation between the rich and the poor. In fact, many people in western nations are afraid of ghettoes because they tend to link poverty with insecurity.
Individualism that characterizes western nations has been one of the reasons why people in western nations hardly have time for each other. For example, many people in the United States do not know the names of their immediate neighbors. I have to admit that I also do not know some of my immediate neighbors. But who is to blame for this? Clearly the root cause of this problem is the structure of society. The individualistic foundation on which western nations are based has been the fundamental reason as to why people have no time for each other.
In full understanding of the differences in the structures of societies both in the East and the West, I have had a growing urge within myself to educate people on the need for peace and cooperation around the world. The differences that exist between nations in the East and those in the West should not be a source of conflict, but a way of learning from each other. Both the East and the West has many things to learn from each other. My dream and long-term goal is to establish my own foundation that would assist children from poor backgrounds in third world nations to receive quality education.
