Klaus Doring

Our globe and its whole population bear innumerable strange facets. Following many people’s opinion, this world shows mostly worried characteristics and symptoms. It’s a world with quickly bridged distances; a world becoming smaller. Any tourist, even with little time and only a small budget can travel to other far away cultures. But joining different cultures, races and religious communities into an “international or multinational group” requires, first of all, great care, tact, instinctive feelings, empathy and logical ideas.

And, don’t forget: it procures an overload of refugees, unintentional confusion of familiar and intimate places. The stranger, whom we meet for the first time, might be an uncommon, odd or an extraordinary guy. He might be somebody from another country, town or place, who acts like a newcomer. I also was a newcomer in the Philippines during my first visit 1976. The stranger might be somebody, who speaks another language and who has another skon color. The stranger and strangeness: the immigrant, the emigrant, the restless hiker or the overstaying stranger in our neighborhood.

The “foreign body” as an “alien element” besides us can become a provocation or a challenge. Strangeness can become exoticism. Why don’t we try another newly opened restaurant with its strange but exotic food?

Going abroad can open other and better horizons and will not let us feel as “the stranger in paradise“. However, an immigrant, wherever he or she is living right now, bears a juxtaposition of (calculated?) optimism, confused feelings, nostaligia, and homesickness, The round trip ticket remains always in mind, because no one among us can escape his native roots,

A stranger in a foreign country needs first of all tolerance - practicing tolerance. Being tolerant means being supportive, forbearing and broadminded. I still have this ideal in my mind and heart, that we all could mix our cultures and become friends without giving up our own identity.

Not all gays and lesbians are unnatural, not all Jewish are swindlers or con-men, all blacks are dirty, all foreigners in a country are dangerous criminals and not all white people are rich…!

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