Cultures of life

At a young age, I had to move away from the Philippines to move to Qatar, I went to a

international school, where I was introduced to kids from all around and world, kids of

all sorts of color and kids that have grew up with their own culture. Ever since I was a

kid I was already experiencing cultural convergence and I obviously was very clueless.

One thing I did notice was that religion plays a huge role in culture convergence, a lot

of Arabians and Hindu individuals were very close to one another and shared their

culture like it were their own, because both of them share the same religion which is

Islam.

Growing up I wasn’t like every Filipino kid, where I enjoy playing basketball, I was

different because I grew up in an area where all the different cultures would come

together to celebrate and play football or in another words soccer. Through football I

met new friends and learned their culture, I realized how similar our everyday life was,

I was Filipino and he was Indian, we both came from areas where poverty was a major

problem and family and school were the biggest things in our lives, I learned to

appreciate my family more because of him and I continued learning more about his

culture and his culture, we shared our food and beliefs and found a lot of similarities, I

used to think that using hands to eat was very weird and embarrassing because I have

never seen anyone else do it, he taught me to embrace it and my culture.

I also met a kid that was a Latino, and obviously we would have very similar cultures

because of Philippines and its history with the Hispanics, we found words that we would
both understand, and words with certain similarities, he introduced me to basketball,

and we would be the very small group of kids that would actually play the sport and

celebrate it. I learned to appreciate my language and be scared of a lot of supernatural

legends because of him.

In conclusion, globalization has a huge impact on culture convergence, from my

experience it was through sports like football and basketball, I would be a completely

different person without the friends that I have met in my younger ages.