Everyone is the Same

I got to eat dinner with the Cummings family last night. They invited us (me, a member of the branch named Emil, another BYU student named Mike, and a UofU student named Miranda) over for steak and ice cream (and other stuff, but "steak and ice cream" just has a good ring to it).

After dinner, we sat for a long time talking. You know how nice it is to talk on a pleasant Saturday evening after a good meal--you can do it for hours. We did. As the sun went down, Todd called his neighbor, Fares, and invited him over for the brownies and ice cream. He showed up a while later and we enjoyed the rest of the evening with him.

At one point, Fares said "You know what? Everybody all over the world is the same--it's just the language that's different." Three things instantly jumped out of our evening together that give a lot of support to his point:

1-Catherine made dinner, except for the steaks. Guess who cooked the steaks? Todd. I don't know what it is, but I swear that in every culture I've ever interacted with, men do the grilling. Men grill the hamburgers, men grill the hot dogs, men grill the khorovats, men grill the steaks, men grill the kabobs. I think it's an inescapable fact of human nature that men like to grill things.

2-We got up to leave after a couple hours of talking. And instead of leaving, we stood there talking. Todd kept talking with Mike and Emil, I kept talking with Catherine, and Miranda kept talking with Clara. Fares got my attention and said, with a smile, "You see? It's the same for everybody. It takes an hour to actually leave!"

3-Fares offered us a ride home. As we went to get into his car, he apologized for the mess in the back, and moved several stacks of paper from the back seat into the trunk. "Sorry--this is my car and my office," he said. Who doesn't apologize for their messy car when they offer someone a ride?

Over the past week, I've seen in a dozen other ways that "everybody is the same--only the language is different!" You may be surprised, for example, to find out that Arabs have personalities, and not only personalities, but precisely the same personalities that Americans have. There are the really nice quiet people who will talk to you if you talk to them. There are people who are really loud, people who are really quiet, people who are really smart, people who are really obnoxious, people who like to help other people.

Just walking around on campus, I see men and women on crutches, with splints on their hand, with a walking cast on their leg. Everything I've seen in the last week suggests, in fact, that the problems that Arabs face are precisely the same as the problems Americans face.

Fares is right--we really are all the same!