It gets even worse when I talk to my friends who migrated from Poland and who, living surrounded by people from Arabic countries, India, Pakistan, radicalise even more. One of my friends, after 3 years of living and working in the UK, says that indeed, these people are sometimes good, but the best thing for all of us is to stay away from each other and keep our pure cultures and races. And that it worries him blond girls decide to sleep with black guys. I know I come from an extreme country, where 96% of the people are Poles, and we’re all white and catholic - and now imagine even with this huge wave of migration, only some of these people will bring back some good stories of the others. It really makes me wonder that if the stories do not help, if own experiences do not help (wait, I even have a friend living in Brussels who didn’t join us on the LOTE evening because it was in Molleenbeck), then how do we make people trust each other and grow a positive, open, supportive, inclusive society?
It is also a challenge to create this environment for meetings that would not feel like encountering something exotic and different due to some voyerist instincts - I used to work in italy for an NGO and we organised human libraries there, but even though it is some sort of step for people to have a chat with migrants from Ghana and Bangladesh, to meet transvestites and gay community members, it felt a little bit like a show. These people run into each other on the streets, you see them every day - why so many of us decide not to interact, discover and understand them? It’s a puzzle.