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| Best buddies Adam and Bernie |
Taking our 4 year old to preschool—a 1 mile bike ride with him
straddling the handlebars—is a task that I surprisingly enjoy. Why? Because
that is how Belizeans travel and I feel like balancing our son in his pint
sized blue and khaki preschool uniform, is my very own rite of passage, the one
thing that says “I fit in.” As I ride
down the streets of PG with him in tow I wave at passersby and proudly
smile. A smile that for me seems to say
“hey I fit in, I’m not just a ‘visitor,’ I’m just like you, see I have children
in school to prove it.” It’s one of the
few times here where I feel established and a real part of the community. It’s also one of the few times that I feel
like people aren’t looking at me wondering what I’m doing here or when my
flight heads out.
Our
preschooler is 100% boy and 4 years old. He
has a best friend, Bernie, literally born days apart from him, who lives right
next door. Bernie is Mayan, full of
smiles and also 100% boy. After about a
month of shyness those two finally made each other’s acquaintances and it’s been
a match made in heaven ever since.
Virtually every minute of every day these boys spend together—playing
super heroes and adventurers or spending their down time in front of Bernie’s
TV watching pro-wresting and Scooby Doo.
They never skip a beat and when one is gone or ill the other waits at
the end of their front porch anxiously for a time when play can resume. They know no barriers with each other—no
language issues, no cultural conflicts and certainly no prejudgments of one
another. The life of a preschooler
appears to be socially perfect. Yet, at
some point, without warning those attitudes and feelings change.
When
did we change? That’s a question I find
myself asking. And now that I live where
I do, I find myself pondering that question a whole lot more. Our daughters, ages 8, 11, & 12 have
already begun to notice a difference.
While things have improved over the months and although children have
gotten to know them better, they’ve certainly experienced their fair share of
prejudices—children making “white girl” remarks and classmates hesitant to make
friends with them altogether based on their differences.
As an
adult it’s even more apparent. There’s
just something about our differences that has made it hard for people to open
up. On my end that sometimes elicits
strange looks from passersby—almost a look of “what are you doing here, you
don’t belong?” Or that uncomfortable
feeling I get when I feel like I’m being targeted for my skin color—when someone
asks to borrow money or when something that belongs to me gets stolen.
It’s
times like these that I step back and reexamine my own feelings and
attitudes. Here, I view my neighbors and
the people I interact with generally as clean, respectable, hard-working
citizens. Yet I wonder: if some of these same people had moved to my
hometown in the U.S., how would I view them there? Admittedly, I’m not sure I’d view them in
quite the same light. I may assume that,
based on their accent and skin color, they have less money than I and work in
the lawn care, hotel, or other service type industry. Until
we moved to Belize, I’ve been in the majority for my whole life. There’s an element about that where, even if
not completely, I have always fit in. Prejudice,
it’s a life of pure prejudice, and the same prejudice that I find myself
fighting against as a minority in a foreign country. When do these prejudices become a part of
us? When do they start to creep in? When do we let cultural differences and skin
color get in the way of potentially building some amazing relationships?
Living
here in Belize has been extremely humbling for me. I always stick out and no matter what the
situation, I rarely fit in completely. I
have an expat friend who has lived in Belize for 6 years now yet she admits
that it’s still difficult for her to break those barriers and to make deep
connections with many residents here. I
don’t think it’s necessarily a refusal to accept each other’s cultural
differences that prevent connections from being made but I do think that deep
inside, it has somehow become ingrained in us to close off that openness that
could otherwise allow us to see each other in the same light. Are we not all human, sons and daughters of
the same God? Do we not all have hopes
and dreams? Do we not all want the same
things in life—to be loved and to love?
Yet all too often, when it comes to relationships we choose to go with
what is comfortable—with what we know. Tolerance is one thing, I’m a tolerant person
who enjoys experiencing other cultures.
Openness is another. How open have I been in the past to reaching
out and attempting to build relationships with my international neighbors or
with those from different socio or economic backgrounds?
Take it from me, there are a lot of people who
live on this earth in an environment that makes them feel different. I think it’s up to me to try to embrace the
perspective of my preschooler and to focus on our commonalities. My
hope for myself that I take away from this past year’s experience is that I
don’t ever forget what it feels like to try to fit in with a different
culture. My hope with you reading this
is that you too feel challenged to connect yourself with those who may
otherwise have no connections. Smile at the woman wearing the burqa, strike
up a conversation with the mestizo at the farmer’s market, bring some brownies
over to the single mother who just moved here from Mississippi. These small acts of openness may open doors
to meaningful relationships that could otherwise be overlooked.
