Week 6: Cultural Competence

            Having grown up in a culturally diverse area, I spent my years up until high school with friends that, though American, participate in vastly different cultural practices from myself.  Spending time with these people, especially during my early years of life, has established in me the cultural competence I believe I possess today.

[ERROR IN .JPG UPLOAD]

            After my first visit to an Indian friend’s house, I recalled spotting a room of her house dedicated to a shrine to a figure I did not recognize.  I asked her about it and was intrigued by the concept of Hinduism.  At only eight years old, I was deeply curious about other cultures and spent a whole week researching various religions apart from my own, Catholicism.

            Experiences like this one have shaped my cultural competence and made me a more tolerant person through a deeper understanding of other people’s ways of life.  Having tolerance of people’s religion has gone hand-in-hand with tolerance of ethnicity, cultural practices, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.  I confidently believe that I am quite culturally competent because I examine and research these ways of life and try to do so with as little bias as possible.

            My senior year of high school, I wrote a thesis paper on the role of Muslim Americans in light of the ongoing War on Terror and the aura it has placed on the Muslim world.  I investigated statistics on Americans’ perceptions on the Muslim world, Muslim Americans’ perceptions on their social position in America, Muslim Americans’ perceptions on the September 11 attacks, and more.  Although I prior believed Islam to be a religion rooted in expelling “evil” from the world with whatever means necessary, the research proved to me that it is in fact a very peaceful religion with a basis of 6 pillars of values shared by all other Old-Testament-recognizing faiths.

            So when I encounter someone from a different culture, I try to focus not on the differences between us, but the similarities.  I then devote time to achieving a better understanding of their culture through research and learning.

[ERROR IN .JPG UPLOAD]

            I take pride in my successful interactions with others, and after studying Vaughn and Phillips’ model for intercultural interactions, I realize that my success in everyday interactions stems from a balance between intrapersonal competence, interpersonal competence, and cultural competence.