Christian Reagan Reagan 1
Melissa Fasolino
English 4
October 20th, 2014
Describe a setting in which you have collaborated or interacted with people whose experiences and/or beliefs differ from yours. Address your initial feelings, and how those feelings were or were not changed by this experience.

This past summer I was blessed with the opportunity to go on a mission trip to New York City. Our mission in the morning was to help teach English Second Language class that was located in the Muslim community. I was very nervous going into the start of the trip because I was unfamiliar with the Muslim culture and had no clue as to how they would react being taught by Christian’s who also were attempting to spread Christianity to them. Much to my surprise the students of the class were extremely kind to us. They all greeted us with the American handshake and hello as well as a traditional formal greeting commonly practiced in the Muslim culture. The students were very attentive during class making it clear they were eager to learn the English language. Many of the students had been attending the class for several months to a few years, and wanted to do nothing more than stay and chat. They were all men from the ages of 30 to even 67, several of whom had doctorates in fields such as physics and chemistry and decided to quiz our skills in the subjects and were quite disappointed that we didn’t know a lot of information that to them in their home countries was considered basic knowledge. With their hospitality and friendliness my hesitant attitude quickly was diminished and I quickly became intrigued to learn about our cultural differences as well Reagan 2

as how their lives were in their home countries compared to their new lives here in America. One of the differences they said was the biggest was the amount of food we have here. In America we have easy access to tons of food and the size of the containers that the food comes in are almost twice as big as what they sell in foreign countries. They also talked a lot about the freedom to publicly profess your religion as a huge difference. They were all amazed at the fact that anyone could walk around and talk about their religion and be very open in the public about any religion. After leaving New York I felt very ashamed of myself that I was so close minded before the trip thinking that the Muslims we were working with were going to be hostile towards Christian’s and that they could have possibly posed a threat to us. The trip really opened my eyes to the fact that Muslim’s aren’t the way the media portrays them to the American population. They are a very loving group of people who are extremely intelligent and open to all aspects of life and ideals. I had many great and intellectual conversations over the course of that week in New York and it changed my mind the way I looked at Muslims in a positive way.