Lets Try Again

So I have spent the last couple weeks trying to reach out to Jun and get him to meet up with him again. This was highly unsuccessful and I proceeded to go through Britt Luby about it. She set me up with a different conversation named Isabela. I was a bit anxious about meeting up with a new conversation partner. My first one did not go over well at all. So I was wondering if this one would be different. It was going to be a really awkward situation to be in if I had the same experience occur as last time. I went for it though and met with her at Union Grounds. Of course we had that awkward first encounter, saying hey and asking how each other were doing. I, being the uneasy one, attempted to ask her about herself and why she was in the United States. She told me about being an agriculture major student in Brazil but that she needed to learn English because it would be very helpful in the future. This conversation pretty much put us to ease because after I found out that she was majoring in agriculture I knew that we had a connection that we could talk about. I found out that her father is a big farmer in Brazil. We actually proceeded to talk about different crops that were grown there as well as back in west Texas where I am from. There were some similarities such as corn. Then there were some differences. They’re known for growing sugar cane while back home our big producers are cotton. I think the most surprising thing for me to learn initially was that there are rodeos in Brazil. For some reason I just assumed that that was an American thing that American (and Canadian) cowboys competed in. Turns out that it’s not. We both were able to agree that bull riding is still the best event to watch. I asked her if the agriculture here influenced her in any way to come to TCU as opposed to another state. She kind of appeased my “Texan Ego” when she said that she thought Texas was the best state so that was an influence. I really enjoyed talking to about all of it. I feel like too often we as humans get caught up in our immediate bubble. Because of this we think that we’re the only ones who are doing a particular thing and others don’t have that experience. Talking to her about these simple things like farming made me remember that in a lot of ways were all alike. We all may come from different backgrounds but we’re all human beings that should be respected and treated right. With everyone that’s been going on I felt that that was a key lesson to take from this. I’m super excited to get to talk to Isabela when we meet again. It was fun meeting up and talking  like we did.