Last semester, I had the incredible privilege of studying abroad in Amsterdam. This was an amazing opportunity, and it is one that I will cherish for the rest of my life. However, it wasn’t without its struggles, and one fear that increasingly occupied my mind as I approached the departure date for my program was culture shock. I was worried that the experience of traveling abroad to an entirely new country for a whole semester would prove too much for me to handle — and that the differences between Amsterdam and Morocco (where our program took us for two weeks) and the U.S. would be so difficult to overcome that they would prevent me from settling into my temporary new home.
Culture shock, the term used to describe the feelings of anxiety that surround the prospect of moving to or visiting a new country or culture, is a very real thing, and there were certainly moments during my time abroad where I experienced it. But this article isn’t about culture shock. This article is about the absence of it.Â
From the moment that I landed in Amsterdam, I was immediately struck by how strangely familiar it all felt. There were variations, of course: The Dutch writing on the signs, the grocery stores I’d never seen in America, the accents of the people I heard talking around me. But the Amsterdam airport was not all that dissimilar to the Denver International airport, the one I’ve been going to for most of my life. There were still gift shops, cafĂ©s, and stressed families trying to make their flight on time.Â
Almost immediately, I had a strange sense of disappointment. In my head, I had expected that everything would look and feel so much different once I arrived in Amsterdam, as though I had entered an entirely new world. And in some ways, this was true — there were so many aspects of Amsterdam that startled me, and I was under absolutely no delusions that I was abroad — yet I found myself quickly adjusting to the reality that the reason Amsterdam didn’t feel like an “entirely new world” was because, simply put, it wasn’t. It may lay across the ocean from us here in America, but it is still very much a part of the same world that we live in.
Once that initial disappointment faded, I began to appreciate that sameness. Despite the rise of technology making it ever easier for us to connect with people on a global scale, there is a sense of isolation to our world today, and sometimes it is hard to remember that we truly aren’t all that different from one another. I thought that going abroad would only deepen my assumption that people across the world have lives so vastly opposite to mine that I couldn’t begin to imagine them; instead, going abroad challenged that assumption, and forced me to recognize that, in the end, there is far more that connects us than that which separates us.Â
In Amsterdam, people complained about the weather and the government, about the healthcare system and how cold it gets in the winter mornings. In America, we often hear how much better it is in Europe — and though that is certainly true to some extent, in some contexts, the reality of it is that Europeans deal with many of the same problems that we do here. Having the chance to lose my rose-tinted glasses in regards to how people around the world live was incredibly valuable for me; it made me realize that it is a pointless exercise to place other countries on pedestals and lament how great everybody else has it compared to us.Â
But what truly struck me was our two-week excursion to Morocco. The Western world is, and has been for a long time, preoccupied with propagandizing Islam as a monstrous, frightening religion, and Muslims as a dangerous, foreign people. While I never believed these things to be true, having the chance to actually visit a majority Muslim country and witness it for myself was massively eye-opening. While in Morocco, we had the wonderful opportunity to visit various activist groups doing important, valuable work around the country. The Western world often enjoys characterizing Islamic countries as places trapped in the past, primitive, inhumane. Yet the Morocco that I saw was rich and beautiful, and filled to the brim with people working to create a better world for themselves — not, I might add, unlike the people I meet every day here in the States.Â
All across the Earth, there are communities and individuals weighed down by their own struggles, their own grief, their own pain. And, too, there are communities and individuals who are driven by joy and by hope, by the unceasing belief that we can build something kinder and more forgiving from the rubble of the world we’ve been given. I returned from my time abroad not despairing at how similar we all are, but delighting in it. It is too easy, sometimes, to be convinced that our world is torn apart by division and strife, anger and discrimination, yet there is so much more that brings us together. We simply have to be brave enough to see it.Â