Coming to UJ as an international student, the hardest part wasn’t the coursework or the academic pressure, it was the silence. I didn’t speak the local languages, and I felt it. Misunderstood. Left out. Not knowing what to do.
But here’s what I learned, even when we do speak the same language, we don’t always understand each other. What’s “normal” to me might be completely foreign to you, because of where we come from and how we were raised. Language is only one wall. There are others.
Unity Through Diversity is my initiative to break both down by helping university students connect across language barriers, and helping us actually understand each other’s different backgrounds, not just tolerate them. Because no one should feel invisible just because of a language barrier.