There have been many experiences and great conversations about race and much more that have stood out to me during this program. But a lot of those have been written about already, so I’m going to talk about an experience I had at work that for unclear reasons I’ve been thinking about too much.
During our weekly parent workshops, we like to have the parents do an icebreaker because many of them don’t know each other well. For one, we paired them up with a stranger and they had to find an interesting fact they had in common, something more obscure than jus “we have brown hair” or “we’re from Southwest Detroit.” The example we gave was, “we’ve both been electrocuted.” But anyway, we didn’t have enough parents that day, so I was partnered up with a woman named Maria.
Maria and I started sharing details about our lives, trying to find commonalities. Maria has seven brothers, and I have one. Maria’s biggest priority in life is her many children, and I am obviously not a parent. Maria is a fairly religious Catholic, and I’m a fairly non-religious Jew. We talked about our childhood and our current lives to the best of my abilities with my limited Spanish, and found that we had essentially nothing in common. As we struggled to find something to share with the group, I realized we were wearing pretty much the exact same shoes and both had the same scrunchie on our right wrists and a watch on our left wrist. When it was our turn to share, this coincidence is what we told the group about and they thought it was hilarious.
I don’t exactly have a big conclusion that came from this story to share. Maybe it’s a little representative of the difficulties of working with a culture that is so different from your own? Although I love and respect the Southwest culture, I sometimes get frustrated with myself because since I’m not part of the community, don’t fully understand the culture, and don’t speak the language perfectly I feel kind of like I’m not contributing enough. Maybe it has more to do with how although our backgrounds are so different, I’ve been able to grow very close to my coworkers and learn so much about them. Regardless, that was an experience that has stood out to me and I’m not totally sure what to think about it yet.
