...the relationships between Peru and Ecuador after the "War of CENEPA" and about the fact thay the GOVERNMENT (the people are not to blame) of Peru took a great piece of our territory not many years ago. Nevertheless, after taking a look at Vale's blog, I can see that she already wrote about it - so I will write about other thing instead. Its also related to the sterotypes and ideas that people have about countries and how these affect their views on their habitants. For example, it can be commonly heard lately how people link Colombian people to mafias and drug producing and to FARC and all of that. Its quite common to hear how people think that the USA is full of overweight and overly consumist people that are damaging the climate with CO2 emmisions. Its quite common to relation people living in the Middle East to the events of the twin towers and to terrorism. All of these imposed stereotypes found in relation to the countries show how people often tend to categorize individuals by the country in which they belong and the things they generally say about that type of people.
This often happens because of the lack of informantion given to students from an early age, which limits their knowledge of the different cultures and people in the world. I myself could prove that this was indeed, sadly enough, true. Last summer holidays, when I went to the exhange programme to Cheltenham, we were invited to one of the girls houses in Bournesmouth. That night we stayed over at her parent's house we had dinner with them and they began asking us about our country and its features. All of the sudden, this girl's older brother asked us how it was living in an African country. An AFRICAN COUNTRY. It was rather shocking how his knowledge of countries outside of his own were quite limited. He even said with full confidence after that how he had learnt that our country had been invaded by Chinese people from early days (Ok, we're not invaded - there's only a lot of chinese people that have been migrating to Ecuador to open their own little shops and all xD). He didn't realize he was wrong until we explained that Ecuador wasn't in Africa and that he might have confused it with Equatorial Guinea.
Additionally, lately, every time someone talks about Ecuador they link it to all the FARC and drug selling activity that takes place in Colombia, which shows how the "stereotypes" have been filtering through to the country's own image, making that immigrants in countries such as USA and Spain are often treated badly and discriminated. This shows how the name of a country can adquire a significance based on the actions of few.
Song's I'm listening to: Fairytales - Jon Walker, Clocks - Coldplay, Creep - Radiohead
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