Alistair
| Name: |
Alistair |
| I live: |
Curled up in front of my laptop :) (Which for the mean time is in Sydney, Australia) |
I am a 20 year old Australian who is passionate about making a difference. I'm the definition of a third culture kid - I grew up in Australia, lived in Hong Kong while I finished off high school, followed by a stint in the Middle East where I was involved in some youth dialogue projects. I am at the moment attempting to get an Iraqi World Schools Debating team up for the tournament in Qatar in 2010.
I tried to narrow it down to one thing that I am ‘into’ and all I can come up with was ‘dialogue’. I’m into talking with people about issues that affect them. This stems from my fascination of culture and difference. I try and take a view, opinion, or perspective expressed by someone else and try and understand the background to it. The media and government tend to generalise issues, by saying ‘Iraqis believe this’, ‘Americans are conservative’, but I’m more focussed on the plight of the individual as we are all different – yet all the same because we all begin with the potential of making a positive difference in society.
I like to travel and see events first hand - this is what has convinced me to defy the wishes of my parents and visit countries such as North Korea, Syria and Iraq. Many things are different to what you see on the news, others are the same, but there is no substitute to going there, sitting down over a cup of tea and talking with them about the issues that affect them.
This work is licenced under an Attribution-NonCommercial licence.
© 2008. First published on actnow.com.au
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