Multiculturalism as a threat and multiculturalism as an asset | Rebar Jaff | TEDxErbil

[Music] [Applause] I'm nothing special okay I am just an example of many Kurdish people who have become a refugee and who come back with an interesting story when I was 9 years old my family became a refugee like most of the people in the Kurdistan region we went to Iran for the first time I was you know exposed to a different culture well they said it was a different culture but I didn't really understand what that meant because they looked the same they just sounded different they spoke a different language we came back to Kurdistan things were better this was in 1991 again I was n don't do the calculation I was born in 1982 um and then we became refugees again this time to Jordan it just fell felt like another vacation Refugee being a refugee was the story of Life of every Kurdish person in Jordan I did my best to learn Arabic the language that I was afraid of before because I heard bad things about Arabs you know they used to kill us that's what they said you know they used to take things away from us that's what I believed so this time we ended up in Canada it was a very very long journey you know 11 12 or maybe 15 hours I can't even remember for a child like me it was a very long journey we arrived in Canada for the first time and I felt like I was a human I don't know why because I was still the same person when we arrived at the airport at the Toronto International Airport it looked amazing people were different sorry people were different I was trying to see how many colors of people I saw at one point I just gave up because it's not only white and black we have brown we have beige we have blue and then the hair colors came and that I got even more confused you know people have different colors and then I said okay I need to calm down because I think I am just one of them so the police officer walked to my family and I thought uhoh I am Kurdish that means I need to be arrested again even though I was never arrested but I heard a lot of stories about Kurdish people being arrested being killed being tortured and things like that my father gave the documents to the police officer the immigration officer that's what they called them there um because we were relocated to Canada through the United Nations um High Commissioner for refugees and so when the police officer came to us said can I see your passports please my father presented the passports and he looked at me and my two brothers and my sister I was the oldest and he does this to me and he's like welcome little Canadian and I thought I was being mistaken for somebody else um I looked at my dad I said Dad I think he called me Canadian I think we're here by mistake my dad said no this is the country where people are the same they're equal and so this is when I started to really try to understand what multiculturalism meant what bilingualism meant what all these different things meant to me everything was a new terminology so when I was new in Canada just like every other family in the Middle East they all want their sons and and and daughters to be doctors right how disappointed were your parents when they realized that you were not accepted into the College of Medicine anybody oh yeah there's only there's one honest person oh yeah I see more hands now because I talked about honesty good well I studied for one and a half years um dentistry and everybody was already calling me a doctor and I said please don't call me a doctor I don't know if I'm going to pass what if I fail and then I become something else I took a year and a half of Dentistry you know bragging about I was going to be a doctor things like that and then I decided to come back here to Kurdistan and do something different I didn't know what I was going to do because I was not really a full dentist the only thing that I had with me was the English language so I said okay at least I can do something I can teach English to people so I started teaching English and then I got into journalism because you know every Kurdish person cares about you know human rights politics and blah blah blah you know so I went back to Canada and I went to the um adviser of my University and I said listen I am now considered a Sciences student can you please add political in front of it and she said well that's political sciences there's no relationship between sciences and political sciences I said of course there's a relationship scien is in both of them anyway I went to political science I decided to continue I loved political science my marks went up immediately because I was finally doing something that I was enjoying um I finished my bachelor's degree and then I was still struggling about this whole idea of multiculturalism people living together from different cultures from different nations different languages at the same time holding one passport that ISS Canada and when I became a Canadian citizen I wasn't sure if you know I was really Canadian or not because in Canada the ideology the the mentality is that the more mixed your grandparents are the more Canadian you are so I thought to myself okay I am definitely not Canadian because all four grandparents are Kurdish because so I decided to wonder you know I started asking my parents what are my grandparents to see if they were different somehow so I could be more Canadian because my friends you every time I asked a friend in the University I said you know where are you from and they're like well what do you mean I say you know where are you like what are your background you know like what's your background and they would say well um I am 20% Irish 50% English 30% this I didn't even know how you can calculate percentages of your grandparents like do you cut them like what do you do so I you know people ask me what are you I said well I am 50% Iraqi 50% Kurdish you know because you know that's interesting I want to be different I want to be like I want to be like a person by percentages you know I don't want to be 100% something because that's boring right um anyway so I went to the passport office for the first time to get a Canadian passport and I see you know like 10 Windows 10 different people giving passports two people one of them was wearing a scarf one of them was white one of them was black one of them I don't know what color one of them was Asian one of them was something else and I didn't know what which window I had to go to because I wasn't sure if I would I wasn't sure what country's passport I was going to get it was called the Canadian passport office but everybody looked different so I said you know Dad do they all give the Canadian passport or are they different different passports what is this my dad said calm down these are all Canadian people just like you you're Canadian today so you're going to get a Canadian passport from one of these people these are all Canadians okay so I was still getting used to the idea of being Canadian and being Multicultural and things like that and then I started to question myself well in Iraq we don't even have half of the you know the the societies and the the ethnic groups that we have in Canada why do we hate each other so much well it goes back to the history okay our history was Bloody you know everybody killed everybody it was like a butcher shop you know but Canada doesn't have a very you know um we also have a very embarrassing uh history if you go back because the English and the French people were also killing each other so when I realized that the English and the French were killing each other the way that the Kurds and Arabs are killing each other now I said okay there's hope and then I started calcul how many years did Canadians take to become peaceful let me see if I can do this calculation for Iraq okay by the time they will accept each other I will be dead so I didn't know what is going to happen to Iraq um anyway so I came back here again and I started to teach politics this time because I had a degree in politics um I started to talk about Canadian multiculturalism I started talking about diverse the Charter of Rights and Freedoms everybody's equal everybody's supposed to be like this and that um and then I realized you know I still need to learn more because with a bachelor's degree you can't really teach the Academia because Academia is where change really happens I thought to myself you know because okay the the people who are teachers of elementary school and high school these teachers I have no chance to teach them but but I can at least teach the people in University so I decided to go back again this time I decided to become more Canadian and what is that by learning the second official language of Canada which which was French so I said to my dad I said Dad I need to go to somewhere where I can speak French and he said okay go to Montreal they speak French I said yes but I I don't speak French so when I go there every time I start speaking try to speak French they switch back to English because my French is so bad and we decided you know my Dad and I I um we agreed that I was going to go to France to learn French and to do my masters so I went to Paris wow the sexy city of Europe right everybody loves the French language I said oh my God I'm going to become even a better person maybe I can bring this time English and French back to Kurdistan because this is something this is the least I could do you know this is the least I could do at least teach a language while I'm working on obtaining my degree and then I started thinking to myself okay um I thought you know I think I've come a very good way you know I've come a long way because when I first went to Canada my first job was a dishwasher and my biggest challenge was how clean was my dish and now I'm studying my masters in France I finished my masters I was going to two Universities at the same time doing a double degree so in the morning I was studying in English in the afternoon I was studying in French two different universities so I was almost going crazy between these two languages different languages different assignments different systems of education and things like that so I came back here again and this time I started teaching English and sometimes French when the teacher was not available or whatever and I thought this is you know this is a very good accomplishment I wish I wish we could appreciate our multiculturalism and our biculturalism in this in this country in a rich country like Iraq we have so many people and we could be used for so many different purposes yet we focus on the negative things okay yes we have basically a very bad history of you know living together but my biggest challenge now I decided to go back again to University and this time I started my PhD at the University of Ottawa in Canada and my thesis is going to focus on the question of identity on the question of Tolerance forgiveness and how we can finally live together and this has been my mission in life to see how a rich country like Iraq could overcome all these barriers and to see the differences and to celebrate these differences instead of just targeting the negative points because this is in my opinion one of the best countries in the world all we need to do in is is invest in it with the right Talent with the right people and not losing our energy in the negative things but in the positive things thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 90,836

Keywords: ted, ted x, Change, Iraq, Life, tedx talk, ted talks, ted talk, tedx, tedx talks, TEDxTalks, English

Id: _FSHKircIoA

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 02 2015