My Family Culture

The challenge of uprooting your life and being evacuated to another country with a completely different culture is a difficult task to swallow. What's even harder is choosing just three items to take with your family? Just three small items to describe your culture.

For my family there is an important point to make, besides the human members we have three pets. These are included in my family, not the items we would take. I think this is an important point to make because these animals are not just pets but family. Lucky (dog), Thomas (cat), and Izzy (cat) are all additional members with my fiance and daughter.

For our family, one of our photo books would need to come with us. This would be needed because it holds precious family moments and photos of our departed dog, Cinnamon. The second small item we would take would be one of our laptops. We hold most of our photos on the laptop and even in third world countries you can find locations that would allow for the use of computers. Our laptop/tablet would also allow for the communication between other family member through video (when accessible). The third item is more difficult to come up with, there is just so much that we use on a regular basis that describes our culture as a family. But it would probably be a kindle/some books for our daughter. We are both avid readers and love to read to our daughter. Without that, I think our lives would be disrupted.

Our photos are important because they show our families history. This is important to me because each family holds different experiences in a different light. Our adventures and big moments are the most important to us, this is shown through our photo books. COmmunication between our extended families is very important to our small family. I come from a loud Italian American family that is connected through many generations, where my fiance has a very large extended family of first cousins and aunts/uncles. Keeping in touch is important. Literature is important to us because it shows how important learning is to us as a family.

If someone told me I could not keep all the items upon arrival I would be very upset and frustrated. Unable to live where I wanted with my family and being kept from our extended family in a culture unlike our current one would probably break my spirit if I was told I was unable to keep what little I had left.

This exercise taught me that there is a lot that we could live without but the few items that mean the most I would not part with, but the most of all is keeping us all together.