My Mentorship

Throughout my life, I have had many mentors. At times, these mentors were just everyday people but people who lived a different life than I did. I am only allowed to live once so learning about the perspectives of others intrigue me. Learning about how others think has influenced on how I think and gave me the desire to someday travel the world to be immersed in multiple cultures.
A Guatemalan mother once said to me, “Guatemalan doctors are better than American doctors. American doctors need to use MRI scans and X-Rays to diagnose a patient but Guatemalan doctors do not need to use such technology because neither the doctor no the patient can afford it”. This statement stood out to me because I never thought of American doctors in that way. …show more content…
I met Charlie in Japan at a middle school. We were both studying for two weeks at the school in Japan. Charlie was huge compared to the other students; he had a black father and a Japanese mother. He was the first “blasian” (black-asian) I had seen in my life. He could not speak English so I usually stuck around with him at school to help him out and translate what needed to be translated. With Charlie, the first thing I learned was that it was extremely difficult to translate English to Japanese and vise versa because there are things that are expressed better in one language than the other. I usually speak in both English and Japanese when the person I am talking to can understand both for that reason. The experience gave me the desire to learn more languages. Charlie also noticed many flaws in Japanese culture. As he was a foreigner in Japan, he questioned some Japanese customs. He questioned how there was a social respect barrier between the older students and the younger. I had never questioned the social respect barrier so it was eye-opening to learn how others felt about Japan. Through Charlie, I was able to re-examine Japanese culture so I could take away from the good parts of Japanese culture and push for change in the bad