A simple and everyday gesture of holding the door for someone behind or an expression of smiling to acknowledge someone’s existence can have its impact on you and that individual. Communities are formed by our willingness to interact with one another. By simply living in isolation, survival is questionable, more importantly, progress within communities can’t be made. Student-run clubs are an example made possible because individuals are willing to contribute their efforts to give others a space to feel a part of. Clubs were prominent in high school, each representing a specific type of community and this is no different here at the UBC campus, with its variety of clubs available to students. I remember walking through the Student Union Building during clubs week, where each club had representatives and posters encouraging students to become a member of their specific community. As a first-year student, I felt it was crucial to get to know what clubs are out there, each one holds the possibility of meeting new people and opportunities. The first step however was to interact with these friendly strangers and ask questions. In a sense, we meet and interact with these friendly strangers everyday, and we ourselves are also friendly strangers trying to make an impression, to show prove our existence in the eyes of strangers. It’s also amazing that the speed of interaction with a stranger can quickly lead into an unpredictable friendship.

In class we watched God Grew Tired of Us, a documentary film that followed the journey of three Lost Boys of Sudan, from their experience during their walk to living in the refugee camp in Kakuma to establishing their lives in the United States. The cultural differences made the adjustment to their new lives difficult, especially in terms of interaction. They reflected that there was more freedom to interact with one another in Sudan/Kakuma compared to the U.S. Growing up and living in a Western society, I was pretty sure that “freedom” was the many benefits that we get in Canada. But after watching the documentary film, I realized how restricted we feel around strangers and how any form of interaction with the person standing beside you at the bus stop would some be offensive. At the same time, I remember that as a child my parents told me not to talk to strangers, but eventually we reach a certain age where we are encouraged to step out of our comfort zones and meet new people. In a sense, we can`t get to one another if we don`t get past the stage of being complete strangers.

Another scenario of being friendly strangers occurs when we volunteer. Throughout high school, I volunteered from several organizations either one-time events or long-term/weekly activities. It was at those one-time volunteering events that I felt the need to be a friendly stranger when interacting with the people there. In a broader perspective, I believe that we are all friendly strangers with no other intention, except to garner the acceptance of others, which is needed to form communities in this social-oriented world. However, throughout my volunteer experiences I am not always sure what my intentions are because the purpose behind the act of volunteering is questionable, particularly for high school students who need volunteer hours as a requirement for graduation. In that aspect, the true act of volunteering seems to disappear because it was for our own purposes and this can be applied to humanitarian aid as well. The positivity of having these experience seem to be very useful in terms of self-interest, especially if these experiences are used or featured on one`s resume. Contrastingly, we can argue that we all do good things because it has a feel-good factor to it.Yet, it almost seems that no matter what the good things we do are, it may be entirely based on our selfish nature as human beings. However, even though this may be true, it is always great to know that the person or stranger you helped would see in the near future to take on that role of a friendly stranger and help someone else.

Lastly, with the invention of social networks (facebook, twitter, etc.) we are further encouraged to be friendly strangers on either sides of a piece of technology to help each other out. One popular example of this is in terms of education, were students create course/class groups online on facebook to communicate with each other about homework, tests, and even the formation of study groups, organized online but meet up physically. This however, it more friendly classmates based, but certain organizations set up a twitter or facebook account to receive questions that customers may have in terms service or product and would reply via tweet or post (example: Canada`s TD Bank). However, this type of interaction can occur offline as well such as reading What is the What or any type of life narrative (it can be done online via ebooks), we are simply friendly strangers that are willing to spend time to read about the life of a particular stranger. But it is through the act of reading that we get to know Valentino Achak Deng as a person. His experiences as described in the novel makes his existence more of a reality to us even though there was no physical interaction, which further creates this disconnection of how we are physically distant from one another but through the bond of the book we are connected together as strangers with shared knowledge. In the book`s preface, Valentino writes “I want the world to know the truth of my existence… I wanted to reach out to a wider audience by telling the story of my life in book form”. To him we are friendly stranger because of our contribution as readers to acknowledge his existence and seek truth in his story. However, in the context of the novel, to simply acknowledge or gain awareness is no longer enough, what matters is what we do with this knowledge and whether physical action is one of them?