celebrating differences

As a journalist, I have a "privilege" to travel to many places and to meet new people. This, of course, has to be in line with open-mindedness. Nothing is the same, that's why I have to be ready to accept everything that comes.

Recently, I traveled to Egypt to attend a workshop entitled "Reporting Across Culture: Freedom of Expression in Digital Era". The workshop was good, give me much more ammunition to cope with the changing world. What's best from the workshop was to meet around 40 journalist from many countries around the world: Pakistan, Israel, Italy, US, Lebanon, Syria, Ireland, France, Belgium, and my country, Indonesia.
In 2007, I attended similar program in Taiwan, also meeting with many journalist from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Pacific.

I really love my job because of this. Why? First of all, I always have my own mindset about people from other countries. I read books or articles about them and it created something like stereotype in my back mind. Some misunderstanding might happen. But, all is gone when I myself meet those wonderful people. They tell me a lot about their countries, their culture, their life, their misery, their joy, and so on and so forth. This, of course, really open my eyes!
Moral of the story: reading books is not enough!

Second, from exchanging experiences, thoughts, knowledge, ideas, and hopes, we learned from one another and enrich ourselves with new ideas and thoughts. We brought it home and there we'll have abundant souvenirs that we won't trade for anything. The souvenirs would still prevail in mind long after the program ended.

And third, the most important thing, is I admit that we're different. But, we're not afraid to be different. Yet, understanding and common ground could be found when our mind is open. These differences often lead to deadly conflict, war, enmity, that take one's life. Being different is beautiful. That's what make our world colorful. Just imagine, every people in this planet has same skin, same hair color, same thought, same language. For me, it's boring!!