It’s easy to get lost in the U.S.
I don’t mean physically lost. I mean lost in a particularly American mindset that holds that our perspective is the only perspective, and that
there exists nothing worth thinking about outside our borders. Those few who do believe in the rest of the world hardly understand its scope: There are different ways of thinking out there, whether across the pond in Europe and Africa, or over the Pacific in Asia and Oceania.
The great thing about traveling is not so much material tourism as it is the opening of your perspective.
That’s what I loved the most about going to Berlin: meeting dozens upon dozens of students from other countries. There were Germans from Hamburg and Oldenburg, Americans living in Saudi Arabia, Qataris, Egyptians, Italians…the list goes on.
I had one friend in particular who was born in Belgium but lives in Berlin, whose mother is Palestinian but has a Jordanian passport and whose father is a German diplomat. He speaks three languages fluently and knows conversational Arabic.
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The connections we made in Berlin were more than just social networking (though now I have a place to crash in Istanbul, which is nice). They were about widening our perspectives, and because of that, I feel like I’ve learned more talking to these people than I ever would inside a classroom. An Egyptian student explained the revolution to me from the protester’s perspective. A Swiss student living in Singapore told me about the time he almost got caned by police for being out after curfew and a female student living near Riyadh (the capital of Saudi Arabia) talked about how hard it is to do anything outside the gates of the compound where she lives.
Coming back from four days in Berlin, I see the world a little differently. We all made friends, to be sure: Germans and Turks, Singaporeans and Swedes, Palestinians and Czechs. But these friendships are different from those I’ve made here. These friendships grew and flourished in mere days, sometimes in just hours—a fact that not only shows how friendly international students are, but also how open their dialogues can be: everyone is willing to share their story with anyone who crosses their path.
That was my favorite thing about the BerMUN conference: the unreserved mindset of the people we met, the malleability of their perspectives, the ease with which they spoke of where they had come from. Like any good trip, it made me a different person.
Photos by Diego Fernandez-Pages.
