Before this project I had no real experiences with the African culture, so I did not entirely know what to expect. Therefore in order to prepare myself for the interviews with the foreign students I read up the countries on wikipedia to at least have a general idea about their culture and of course I also watched the videos they recorded. This preparation was really helpful and made following what the students were talking about during the interviews much easier.
I myself was born in Russia but I grew up in Germany for most of my life, so I know how it is to experience ignorance from others concerning your cultural background. Therefore I always try to be open to other cultures myself and meet new people without any prejudices especially before I even start a conversation with them.
German people in general, are internationally known for being cold, humorless and distant individuals who never smile at or talk to you before they really know you. Before this project I thought it was not true but now I see that we are indeed more distant and need more time to warm up to a person than for example the students from Africa and Portugal, at least that applies to me personally. Therefore on the future I will make more of an effort to be more open to people I am meeting for the first time or I do not know too well in general. One more typical german characteristic is punctuality and good organizational skills. This stereotype does indeed apply to the german system and a lot of Germans, especially if you compare our punctuality with the punctuality of for example Ghanaians. But because I already knew about that I was able to prepare myself mentally so that in the end I was not too annoyed about it.
During the preparation of the interviews I was quite anxious because the student from Kenia was not answering my emails and therefore we were not able to make an appointment for the interview. The two students from Portugal and Ghana answered very quickly and it was easy to find a suitable time for us to meet on Skype. During the interview with the Portuguese student there were no problems at all, her accent was easy to understand and she seemed to be very nice. The ghanaian student was very nice too but we had a few problems when it came to connectivity. The first appointment we scheduled was during the afternoon and the internet broke down. Because of that we had to schedule a second appointment later that day, starting at around 8 p.m. The second time the video froze a couple times but it was not too bad. I was just happy it worked at all. The video chat with the ghanaian student went on for more than an hour because I could not get him to end the conversation without being rude, but in the end it was not too big of a problem. The bigger problem was his strong accent. I was barely able to listen and take notes at the same time because I had to concentrate so much on simply understanding what he said. I had to ask him to repeat himself quite a few times and sometimes I even had to pretend that I understood him because I was to embarrassed to ask more than twice whether he could repeat himself. After some time I got used to his accent though. All in all the interviews were very interesting and quite fun.
