Living in two different cultures Eastern and western is like taking one dip in ice and the other in fire.

I am and Afghan, born and raised in Afghanistan, but why I am talking about living in two different cultures, well I was an exchange student to the US many years ago back in 2005.

Since I was a little kid, there were some issues in my community that never made sense to me and I always thought how could they be better or in a way that makes perfect sense, but since I was just a little kid I couldn’t really research and elaborate those matters to myself, so yeah they just stayed as puzzles in my head.

Back to my exchange year that I will mostly focus on that, when I got to know the American culture a little bit, I remembered all the puzzles in my head from many years ago and realized that hey, these people have got ways that solve the issues that I have been wondering about, that is amazing.

I will point out one of issues that always kept my mind to it, our environment was always messy with garbage everywhere and no one even paid attention to it, like it was perfectly fine and I as a kid realized that first of all it just gave the environment a bad look, and besides it was very smelly in the summer.

But the American people had this thing called volunteering, that even I as an exchange student had to do over thirty hours to pass the academic year at the American school, what did I think of this new phenomena that I had came across to learn about? I absolutely loved it because it solved the puzzle in my head, there you go, community members that don’t get paid but just do necessary stuff which help to make their living environments a better place. So I got so excited about volunteering that I did over one hundred and fifty hours of volunteering service when I was in the US and got recognition by the White House, Washington DC and got Presidential Service Award Certificate from George Bush at the time the President of the US and a Bronze Medal of Honor.