Right to live and think

My name is Mare. I’m from Estonia and I moved abroad about four years ago. If I think back, I even didn’t know then why I had to move – I just felt that it’s time to go. Don’t get me wrong: I do love my country and it will always be my home 😉

However, by now I know what I was missing back then. Living in a multicultural city has opened, showed and taught me a lot about the world. And what is even more important to me: I have learned to know myself much better. Here people from all cultures and with different backgrounds have learned to live together. Back home I felt that discrimination was quite strong but now I see that it is just people’s fear of unknown. They simply do not understand different cultures and haven’t even seen, let alone gotten to know, people from other ethnicities. It’s the same now with the migration crisis the EU is facing. People tend to think they are safe in their life where they know everything and everyone. There is nothing wrong with that but I’d like to think that the world is a much more open and tolerant place. Of course, racism exists everywhere, and sometimes even in more extreme forms in multicultural places, but in everyday life you don’t notice it. I just love the feeling that everyone has the same right to live and think.