I work and live...

...in a bubble. Sometimes, I forget this because living and working in Geneva, one tends to see a lot of this:

[Source]

People from every walk of life, every religion, every background walk the streets of Geneva. I can easily walk through a street full of people and count at least a dozen different languages being spoken. You will find many families with parents of two different countries here. One of my closest friends here is a Maori who grew up a solid Methodist in rural Whangarei and is married to an indigenous Buddhist from Bangladesh. Seeing them bring up their three children with a dual identity, in a foreign country nonetheless is fascinating!

Even at my work, the balances of gender and regions (amongst other things!) is a serious matter and one must consider this in every activity that we do. The last activity I organized, we had to bring 45 young people from all over the world to work on peace issues. I tell you, it was really difficult making the selection because we wanted good people with the expertise we needed, but we also needed to make sure there was a balanced number of men and women from 8 different regions!!!

This is the reality I live everyday. And so because of my context, I sometimes find myself surprised that this diversity isn't found everywhere. Like I met 40 year old man last year who had never met an African in his life until he came here for a seminar. Crazy isn't it? And even Samoa has a fairly homogenous society so I guess I must not expect too much otherwise, I'll just be disappointed or worse, judgmental!

Which is why it was a nice surprise to watch this video of country music hottie Brad Paisley. It is a beautiful cheesy and very inclusive video!!! I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope you do too.



Many thanks to our old country gal Ms jandalprint for sharing.