by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: August 06, 2008   Last Updated: January 21, 2009

International friendship can be extremely rewarding, educational, and can broaden a person's view beyond the culture and ideas they live in. For me, the habit of making international friends started by accident when I met someone from South America in a chat room; we became fast friends and have been talking to each other for six years. In the time we have been speaking (through e-mail, instant messenger, voice chats and telephone conversations) we have both grown from high school students to adults concerned with family and work. While I have turned into a full-time at-home freelancer, he has gone on to an advanced degree and is always busy with school work so recently I have felt the need to find more people to talk to for all the times he's not around, specifically because I finally decided to buckle down and learn Spanish in earnest (as opposed to my half-hearted attempts at learning) and I wanted more native Spanish speakers to talk to.

I have a love of languages, so when I found a language exchange site I like I put German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and French in my profile as languages I would like to learn and started finding friends from everywhere...in fact, now I speak to a few people who are native speakers of each of those languages as well as people who are willing to teach me Chinese, Tagalog and Arabic. Now I regularly communicate via instant messenger and voice chat with people in Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, India, Turkey, China and the Philippines.

So what have these friendships done for me aside from helping me learn new languages? A little background...I come from a very small town in Wyoming, I have never lived anywhere other than Wyoming and have not been able to travel to other parts of the world (yet) so all I know firsthand is the culture and way of life in a Christian-dominant rural agricultural community which is an extremely narrow view of the world.

I love to learn new things, am fascinated by history and like to know what happened in the past that made the world what it is today. Through the people I have met online I have learned about the culture and way of life in all these different countries; they often make me think in ways I'm not accustomed to and always leave me wanting to learn more about where they live. Inevitably books on each of these places make it into my reading list and I can say with all authority that I have learned much more about world history,

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