Waiting for Skype...

No Skype this week, :( but all our activities with Dickinson College made me meditate. So, while we're waiting for another exchange, I'd like to talk about an issue that may sound strange if handled by a foreign languages student: the other side of the coin of intercultural competency.

I do love languages and discovering new cultures, ways of life, knowing how people live, work, stay together, laugh and cry and why they do it in countries so far from mine. I like figuring the world like a series of stars in the same sky or a series of snow flakes in a winter day and I like finding that my life as I know it, is just one of infinite possibilities. This thought doesn't diminuish the love I feel for it, but makes me curious about others. I believe we're all at the same level of a huge, beautiful mechanism called life. This is the reason why I decided to study languages and I hope to go round the world.

Nowadays we can improve our intercultural competency very easily: the Internet and its potentials let us to share thoughts, pictures and experiences and put us in touch with the rest of the world as if we all were in the same room. No walls, no distance...no difference. Current tools are an important opportunity for us, but I'm afraid they also represent a great risk, that's the loss of our greatest richness: our differences.

I do love discovering others, but I think that everytime we share we also drop something of ourselves. We grow and it's good. And it's normal. And ineluctable. But I think that my grandparents know anything about India and somewhere in India, other grandparents know anything about Italy. And it's perfect exactly as it is, in my opinion.