We landed in Arkansas at around four in the evening, but for us - myself and my friend Samal, it could just as well have been four in the morning. Having traveled for three days, through three different countries, myself having caught a virus, in 30 degrees Celsius, wearing three shirts to many, I did not have the sweet feeling of adventure I had expected. However, I was happy to be done traveling for now. In the car on the way to the school, I looked out the windows. Nothing was as I had envisioned, no high buildings, no blazing and beautiful metropolitan, just a highway, a couple of fast-food restaurants, and miles upon miles of fields: I had landed in Hicksville, I just wasn’t aware of it.
On the way to school, we stopped at a Wal-Mart, a gigantic get-everything-you-can-dream-of kind of store to pick up a comforter, pillow and other necessities to get by our first night. When I went to pay, the cashier started to talk to me, asking how I was doing. I had never seen this person before and stammered something about how I was tired, to which she replied that I should try some guarana because that really worked for her son, who was a truck driver. I was astonished, but Wal-Mart wasn’t the only place this happened. Everywhere I went, random people I had never seen before spoke to me about the weather, school, their trucks, politics, anything, and everything. As the days went by, I got to experience just how different we were. Issues I felt strongly about could be overlooked or misunderstood, sometimes, I got mad, sometimes sad, and sometimes I was just happy to make it through the day. I remember one night looking at the ceiling and wondering why I had traveled halfway across the world. That night, I fell asleep without an answer.
I have been in Arkansas for almost three years now. After a month or two, things started to gradually get easier. I began to fathom the culture of Arkansas, to empathize with their values, and more important, to understand my own Faroese culture; who I was. Today, I love Arkansas, and I wouldn’t want to go to school anywhere else. The school is excellent and the knowledge I have gained there is monumental. But my schooling has not only happened in the classroom. Before I left for America, a girl asked me if I didn’t think it was to far away to go. I had told her with great confidence that it was only a plane ticket away. That is not true. America is much further away than that. To come here was like going to another planet where the aliens looked human, but their behavior and way of thinking was completely disparate from my own. It is this diversity which has been my greatest teacher: By living, working, and laughing with humans that are different from me, I have learned that my way of doing things is not always the best way. Diversity is hard, but I it is crucial for growth. I am still Faroese, and I will always stick to Faroese values. But now I understand that even we can learn something from the global community: Knowledge that has the potential to continuously transform us into a stronger, wiser, and greater nation.
