My life is an experiment that started two years ago in Grade 7, when I had just arrived in Canada from Russia.
I was asked to write my first paragraph. The topic was: "What happened when you were born?"
I thought this would be easy but found I did not have enough English. I couldn't conjugate. It made it difficult for me to express myself. I ended up with four tiny, broken sentences.
A year later, I challenged myself to write the same paragraph. It should have been no more than eight sentences but I poured so many ideas onto that sheet that I ended up writing a full length, double-sided paper.
That year had been difficult because I had spent it adapting to Canadian culture. This was the basis of the experiment. I was the subject while my values and culture were the variables. When those variables changed, what would the result be?
Before coming to Canada, I saw the world as black and white. If I muddied the two by mixing them, I risked losing myself in a labyrinth of morals. In Russia, I was obsessed with loyalty. I would stand up for my friends even if I knew they were wrong. This was a paradox because I loathe to be wrong.
While Russia is a beautiful country, prejudice was very common and people there can be cold and not very welcoming. Moving from there to Canada gave my family and me so much. People here are so respectful and unprejudiced that my mom decided to practice Islam for the first time. She wanted my brothers and I to do the same but there was an issue with that.
The open-minded, caring culture I had found in Canada had changed my outlook. I had developed a new set of values that were not so black and white anymore. I valued equality. Gender, sexuality, race or religion should never be judged. People should never label you. That is the golden lesson I learned after arriving in Canada.
I could not discard my new values and substitute my religion's values in their place. Although I try to compromise and do what I have to, I cannot ignore the fact that I am a girl and that my religion would remove the opportunity to build a career outside the home.
I understand that culture is part of who I am but is it more important than my individuality? Sometimes you have to think for yourself and do what you think is right, not what your culture dictates.
I might not know who I am right now, and I might not know the outcome of the experiment yet, but I know my values and the reasons behind them.
This article and the piece that will follow in the next week in The Tri-City News were written by Tri-City young people who are part of the Tri-Cities Arts Door Project. Arts Door is a youth-led, adult-supported, community asset-mapping project with two main objectives: creating a youth-focused on-line map of arts and culture businesses and organizations in the Tri-Cities, and conducting a survey that measures the "cultural competence" of the Tri-Cities Arts and Culture industry. The Tri-Cities Arts Door Youth Leadership Team is made up of 14 youth between 13 and 17 years of age, coming from 10 different countries. The Arts Door project is delivered by SUCCESS in partnership with BC Healthy Communities and is funded by the provincial government's Welcoming and Inclusive Communities initiative.
