Negative Patriotism : How I Discover Love to My Home Country
English is not my first language, not even a second.
At the age of 18 I decided it was the high time to learn and speak fluent English and the best way to learn any languages is, of course, is to be surrounded by people, who just speak that language.
So how I planned to go to the states and in 2011 I went to America for four months to work in a Boy Scouts camp in Colorado.
me and my friend in the NYC
I was working as a kitchen staff, the program I went with was "The Camp USA", so I was pretty much doing dishes and making food for the camp people.
And this two months experience working in the camp developed negative patriotism (the phrase I created, that describes patriotism, that comes from the place of negativity, when someone says, does something bad to your dears: for example when your football team loses to another country's team and you are upset I would describe it negative patriotism, but anyway), so I am extremely grateful for this experience.
with my colleaques from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Russia
Closer to the story, as I mentioned, it was a Boy Scout camp, so no regular camp activities, such as dancing, singing and things like that, what we had was campfire every Friday, where we had standup show: each troop would showcase different scenes, mostly jokes.
And one Friday, I went to the campfire and in the middle of the night one troop had a scene
Russia. . . 19th century. . . Museum
[By the way, I dont think I shared before, I am Russian :)]
so continue with the story...
The boss asks the secretary to bring a coffee and winked him after his request.
The secretary brought the coffee, the boss tried it but was not happy with the “coffee”, scolded the guy, hence asked to bring the COFFEE and winked again!
The same scene with a guy coming back and the head of the camp insisting him to bring the COFFEE happened another two times and at the end, he screamed saying “We are in Russia when I ask you to bring me COFFEE, you bring me Vodka!”
Geezas, I got up that minute and felt such a pain in my heart, pain, that is not physical but physical at the same time, the pain that made me realise how much I don’t like when someone insults something, that is so dear to me, but most importantly I realised how much I love the place I am coming from and I felt I wanted to show the world what real Russia is and actually later in couple of years, I managed to bring thousands of foreigners to Russia to be part of social projects and explore the real Russia (but this is whole another long and amazing story)
I am actually grateful for that aha-moment and for the reaction I had that day, because it led me to work on an amazing things later on, so the morality is Russia is not a place, where we drink vodka instead of coffee ;)
And I also leart English very fast <3
Thanks for reading and letting me share the things that matter!
Elvira