The Danger of Diversity...and the Joy

We are chronic Couchsurfers.

This means that we look for people who like to stay with and host perfect strangers in their homes at www.couchsurfing.org, and then we stay with them. Or, if need be, we host them. But now we are on the surfing end of things, which means we are putting ourselves out there to stay in people's homes.

As an American, this is sometimes incredibly painful. Americans are not very gracious guests because we struggle with receiving things. We much prefer to give things and have them accepted, but accepting things ourselves is sometimes difficult.

However, accepting things has opened us up to all sorts of experiences. Here is what accepting hospitality has looked like today in France:

Picnic in the park, which has been built as urban green space on top of a parking garage

The Car Rally in the town center--we went for a spin in the James Bond car!

Outside the Farmer's Market in Ormes. Tian rode on the
back rack.

The boulangerie's offerings

And the local butcher with the itchy nose

Learning how to light a candle like a real Catholic in the Orleans Cathedral

So when we are Couchsurfing, our sanity sometimes is questioned, but so is the sanity of our hosts, and that somehow feels nicer than being all alone in the loony bin. The neighbors here in Ormes think that our hosts are insane for having us, perfect strangers, stay. At the same time, some tell us that we are loons for placing our children in grave danger by sleeping in perfect strangers' homes, eating perfect strangers' food, sharing a laugh with perfect strangers, and letting them all gallivant around foreign places with the offspring of perfect strangers.

Why do it?

Because the world is a big place filled with billions of diverse yet kind strangers. And gosh darn I really want to meet them all.

I was raised in a culture that simultaneously glorifies and demonizes diversity. Diversity is glorified so long as it occurs in a controlled setting--books, school presentations, and antiseptic encounters all count as healthy ways to experience and deal with diversity.

Experiences where diversity is more up-close and personal are potentially laden with danger. Staying with strangers in a private home in a foreign country goes outside the boundaries of controlled. At the point when we enter into that stranger's home, diversity potentially becomes something dangerous, threatening and untrustworthy. But it rarely works out that way. Instead we find commonalities and go from there.

True enough, if we seek out and experience that diversity deeply, the potential to offend becomes much greater, but so does the potential to learn and experience a truly different point of view while discovering that we are not really as diverse as we thought we were in the most important ways.

And so, while we are in France, we are endangering our children's lives and potentially being very offensive. But, man, it sure is fun.