18.02.25 – A Day in the Shadow of the Mountains
today
was one of those days again,
when the invisible chasms between worlds
stared me in the eyes
and I once again felt
how deeply cultural differences are rooted in our glances.
in the morning, still in twilight,
my host mother asked me –
in a soft yet determined tone –
“take me to school on your scooter,
I can’t do it myself”
and I knew immediately:
this is more than just a reason for a ride.
it is a ritual,
a silent display of pride
to a world that sees me as the foreign, the white image.
inside, in the small waiting room
of a rural doctor’s project,
where once a year helpers and doctors
in their white coats
and honest faces
hand out free treatments,
there stood my host mother –
it was supposed to be just a dental cleaning,
nothing grand,
yet in her eyes
it was a moment of connection.
I sat down,
a silent observer,
and felt the gazes – curious,
inquiring, as if I were a peculiar exhibit
in the midst of this warm, rugged world.
the people around me,
the helpers, the patients,
all cast their looks my way,
saying: “there she is,
the white, western foreigner”
and in that moment
I was both an outsider and a part of their universe.
as my host mother got up after the treatment,
she looked at me
and whispered almost silently, “why don’t you do it too?”
I had already carried that thought within me –
why not, when the chance for free healing
is so near and yet so elusive?
but in that question lay the weight of my own identity:
I was aware of the looks,
the whispers,
the unspoken judgmentthat resonated in every fold of my being.
in that moment,
as the world dissolved into shades of inclusion and distance,
I felt with brutal clarity
the burden of my own origin,
my skin, my otherness,
the centuries-old mechanisms of global inequality –
not as punishment,
but as a bittersweet legacy.
yet then,
in a quiet act of belonging,
I sat in the dental chair.
a dental cleaning –
more than just a treatment,
a symbol, a quiet act of rebellion
against the invisible walls
that separate us.
I no longer wanted to be just the observer,
the outsider,
I wanted to belong –
because in this small rituallay the possibility
to bridge this chasm,
even if only in my mind.
perhaps strange glances still flickered,
perhaps whispers were exchanged behind cupped hands,
but in that moment I felt
a little less foreign,
a little more at home –
as part of a community
that, despite all differences,
embraced me for a brief moment.
sociologists speak of cultural immersion,
of diving into the foreign
to rediscover one’s own self anew.
but true immersion means
also accepting the uncomfortable moments,
embracing the unease
and still taking a step forward.
at this threshold,
between the fear of being different
and the courage to become part of the whole,
perhaps true understanding lies.
Hannah Lea van Staa
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