4/7/2006 - Peace as the Bulls-eye
The airport in my homeland was bathed in a misty drizzle early one morning in August as an exchange student weighing as much as her luggage escaped to the warmth of a faraway country. Two hours, several thousand kilometers and about a million extra heartbeats later, this exchange student stood confused at the airport of a foreign country in a temperature thirty degrees hotter.
I was at the beginning of my year-long marathon, poised ready for the start, my mind already racing. No change of continent, staying in the EU and travelling to a country where the language spoken – relatively near that of my mother tongue – should hardly make me face a cultural shock that would transform my picture of the world. However, I nearly tripped over this stumbling block in the first few meters. The earthquakes came creeping up stealthily. Suddenly different family values, social relationships and diet, not to mention the incomprehensible language babbling around me, made my tectonic plates screech, shake and crash like thunder. Rocking and rolling on these waves of change I was sailing as high as mountain peaks rising out of nowhere, then shipwrecked with my bamboo raft foundering in a fresh muddy seabed, the depth of which I had not the slightest premonition on the rainy August morning.
How can a change of living environment for a year affect one so much, especially as literally I was not exchanging the Arctic Circle for the island of Nauru? After getting my breath back, I realized that the course of my exchange year marathon would not be following only the paths that we could foresee before changing country. For a long time, I was dazzled by that part of the road so I seemed to reflect everything in me as just thanks or vague dumb glances. I never got past this hall of mirrors phase. However, there was a change from stressed helmsman to armed guard certainly capable of striking me down whenever I did anything stupid.
My year is not over yet, but what has already happened seems to have taught me more than my twenty years in my native land. After the earthquakes, the sediment at the bottom of my mind was lifted and scattered around like gravel. It has been a long trial, in which I have tested how much I can take, understand and tolerate. I have managed to scrape the hardened limpets off my rudder. I have become convinced that you cannot really know your own culture until you know a foreign culture. Like the chapters in the story of a growing child, my year has followed a certain pattern: first, a comforting lap sought, where you learn to use your hands and head, and achieve self-awareness and inner understanding – a personal wrestling match that must be completed fast. As regards the next phase, independence must be gained because in teamwork, individualism is more important than we can believe. Knowing your own values is essential because from yourself you can demand flexibility in a deadlock – not from others. Where an individual’s flexibility ends and turns to stone, head butting and gritting of teeth begin. When the familiar soil is not there to support you, and knowing and presenting your own history is no longer useful to solve a situation, a person is lost.
This type of set up is dynamite to conflicts that depend on mutual interaction. There are things that we cannot accept, and violently and determinedly trying to change such opinions is not in anyone’s interest. However, we would lose nothing by stopping to think how far we would be prepared to understand the answers that our opponent puts forward. Moving on from egotism is the starting point for the search for your own place in life, and until you find your own personality, it cannot in any way fit where it belongs, so it cannot stretch and mature into new solutions.
It is not difficult to place this chain of events in an atlas everyone knows. It happens every day, but we lose the idea when changing perspective or scale. Mostly it is about just learning, and the ace in the pack of deeply learning one thing or another is understanding.
Under the flag of AFS, I changed my life for a year to promote peace. I have sometimes wondered how much I could actually promote world peace through my year. To what extent could I apply my knowledge of why a Greenlander friend of mine cannot blow his nose while others are present? Perhaps personal experience is the key to the ability of the exchange year to promote peace. I cannot try to change international relations through only my own efforts, but the profoundness of the experience convinces me as a person of something. It convinces me that in searching for a home, one has to move; when asking others to compromise on their demands, one must do the same oneself; when seeking understanding for oneself from others, one must understand others. Because I have shared my year with my host family and my friends, I can be sure that they too have learned something from my experience, not to mention their own experience of foreign countries or hosting a foreigner. I feel I shall have been successful in my project if I can on my return home bring with me some warmth from my host country, incredibly valuable friendship from my friends, wisdom taught by my experiences, and above all my learning how to understand. My journey to my host country has lasted one year but it is by no means ending. As an ordinary marathon woman I am not expecting to break the finishing tape, but see it as my own eternal aim to keep my objectives clear: not to stop searching, not to forget the rest of the world spinning around, and other means of staying above the surface on its waves – to aim for peace with the arrows of understanding and patience.
By Saara Pihlman, AFS participant, Finland to Hungary
Saara is one of the three winners of the Student Essay Competition 2005
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