Me.

Culture has played a significant role in my life, especially during my teenage years. Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1998, as well as having spent a relatively large fraction of my childhood in my homeland, I had the privilege of experiencing the extensive diversity of South African culture in my surroundings. Everything from music, art and sports, to the food and traditions were engraved in my childhood. It developed my love and interest in many things, like music and sport, in which I still find joy till this day. Almost certainly, language plays the most important of roles in my life to date, as it does for almost all humans. It is a special and complex system of communication that is unique to the human race. Besides English, my mother-tongue, I got to learn a fair amount of Afrikaans, a language closely linked to South African history, which also helped my feel more included in my own culture. Evidently, culture was a special part of my childhood. But it wasn't until 2008, the year I moved to the UAE, it started to play a different and more life changing role.

Things in this country are indeed very, very different. It was particularly alien to me at first. Even though the culture here is alike any other, with language, religion, food, music, traditions and customs that are unique to its land, there are strict rules and laws that exist because of this culture. One thing to get used to was not being able to eat in public during Ramadan, a tradition which at first I struggled to understand. Some may judge and show a lack of respect to these laws, regulations and traditions that are a result of a religiously oriented culture. But I, having interacted with people whose lives the culture defined, began to show respect towards them, as well as that which they believed and thought to be right. 

Moving to RIS only developed my respect and open-mindedness towards different cultures further. I started to realise and appreciate the diversity of different cultures from all corners of the globe, and because of this diversity of cultures, no single definition for the word 'culture' can be decided on. It is based entirely on opinion, and how much culture and language played a part in the life of the individual being questioned. Based on what I've experienced culture to be, I think that it is a cumulative deposit of knowledge, beliefs, rules, ideas, customs, and traditions that are acquired by a group of people over generations. But language plays the biggest part. Without it, how would we be capable of depositing any knowledge and communicating ideas, beliefs, customs, etc? Not only is language itself special, but it is the key to what makes us unique, and the most intelligent of all species.