12 million cows and 3 million people

Looking at Sakina’s picture, I remembered how amazed I was the first days of class to getting to know people from so many different backgrounds and cultures, and I am sure that a lot of our learning during the year will come from our classmates as well as from our teachers. For me, it will certainly be a great opportunity, for in the country I come from, Uruguay, we are all so much alike we get used to it and lose perspective.

I was looking up some numbers in the Internet to illustrate my point: Uruguay’s main source of production is meat, with 12 million cows and 11 million sheep, whereas the total population of the country is of a mere 3.4 million habitants, and a million of them live in Montevideo, the capital city. There are towns in the rural area that are practically deserted, rural schools that only have two or three students that every morning go to class by horse (for every student there is a school, that is the government’s policy). The literacy rate is pretty high and because during the two world wars there was a massive immigration of Europeans, our cultural heritage comes mainly from Spaniards, Italians and at a smaller rate English and French. Until the 1950s Uruguay was regarded as the “Swiss of America”, which of course changed after successive economical crisis.

However, people still regard themselves as very cultured and open-minded. That isn’t always so. There is an essayist from Venezuela that writes for a Uruguayan paper, and she says the first thing she noticed when she moved to our country is that everyone kept asking her: “Why did you come here?” And no one was satisfied when she simply answered: “Because I felt like it.” She came to the conclusion that although Uruguayans are very proud of their country, they are also have an inferiority complex that makes them wonder why the hell would someone move there. It is a safe, nice place with beautiful beaches, but also pretty boring. The government has been discussing the same issues for the last 20 years and nothing ever changes. Everything is so bureaucratic that the country seems to be in a lethargic state.
Uruguayans are very concerned on how the foreigners see them, and if they like the country or find it slightly boring as well. And because of this inferiority complex, they suppose people from other countries usually don’t know where Uruguay is geographically located, or what it is like.

However, in school we learn very little about Africa, Asia or the Middle East. In our effort to be recognizable to the world, we make very little effort in knowing more about the rest of it, and become so narrow-minded that we end up learning very little about other cultures, even the North American one. I wanted to share this thought in this blog because I have met people in the class with a great deal of knowledge on foreign countries and a genuine interest in learning even more, and I hope I can achieve the same during the course of this year and the next.

Federica Narancio