Introduction
I was offered a chance to work with a kid from Nepal, his parents being refugees from Bhutan. I would focus on just giving him a chance to step out of his comfort zone and experience new things. We wanted to teach him something about how we live life here, even though he had already been here for a few years. His name was Ashish Subba. We wanted to see how Ashish saw life and compare it to how Americans saw things here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU70W6xUX0k
The Science Aspect
From the scientific perspective, there lie many options to explore in the differences between us. One that I looked into was the science of food and how science as a whole plays a role in the presence of religion. A major gap between the different places is the food consumed. In Nepal, Ashish consistently ate rice and dahl (lentils), with rarely anything else. His lack of balance or even variety was something we were not used to seeing. As seen in the above interviews, so many of us strive for a healthy diet that is usually balanced and contains foods from around the pyramid. Why this monotonous consumption of food? Because living in conditions as he was, in an area of the world such as Nepal, food doesn't come with a menu. The difficulty to not only grow but distribute a wide variety of food in this area is immeasurable. This leads into another aspect; GMO's. When asking Ashish about GMO's, we asked him about science in the presence of religion, and how they affected each other. He claimed he believed in science first, but also stood by his Hindu faith. He claimed that whatever was undefined or unknown was when religion should be in handy, similar to what one of the interviewees said in the above video (Weston). Things get iffy in America when this subject comes up, but Ashish said nobody in his family, including himself, really worries about it.
Literary Aspect
In terms of literature and English, there is an even larger gap. I mean, how can you expect a kid who just learned English to comprehend large amounts of literature, especially when even his Nepali is limited from growing up in the camps. But, like in the old days, Ashish learned by reading religous texts. He is a Hindu, and as such he read the Mahabharatha. The barrier between our world and his also involves literature. While the only available reading he had was the Mahabharatha, a relgious text, we can choose from a wide variety of news columns, fiction, and nonfiction books. Most of us read recreationally, while Ashish read out of necessity, to learn the language. Obviously, nobody in the West learns to read by using the Bible, although that is how people like the Puritans learned to read. This brings about a larger question: education. Ashish values education highly, coming from a place where education was a luxury. Ashish was always diligent, though, and is very ambitious, sharing most teenagers' desire to go to a good school and have a good job. So maybe, just because he's reading a Hindu religous text instead of To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't mean he doesn't have the same ideals. Ironically, while most of his texts were religious, he believes science trumps religion (as mentioned before). This just demonstrates the complexity of the issue, as well as the fact that many things can break through cultural barriers, and science is one of them, as well as literature.
Cultural Aspect
Culturally, Ashish may seem like a distant foreigner, someone who doesn't have any commonalities with us, but really its quite the opposite. Yeah, he eats different food, plays different games, what have you, but what does he do for fun? Well, what do you do for fun? Do you hang out with your friends? Play sports? That sounds like Ashish's idea of a good time. Really, is anyone that different? In the end, we all just want to hang out with our friends, play some sports, and have a good time. We aren't that different than the kids in the refugee camps in Nepal. Ashish plays cup soccer just like so many kids at our school. He hung out with his friends all day in Nepal, just like we do (or want to do). He now does homework for a majority of his time, just like us. Ashish is just a teenage kid, one who likes to hang out and have a good time. What was the expectation? We want to think he's different because he doesn't look like us, talk like us, or come from where we do. But, as we can see in the interviews, we're not really that different from one another.
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