Enter my current job. Even though our current school has nearly 30 instructors, as an American white Male, I am very clearly a minority. If you were to sit in the lobby of the school throughout the day, you would see an interesting and culturally diverse group of young (and some not as young) people all trying to learn to fly. I've personally taught students from Qatar, Egypt, Colombia, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, India, Nigeria, Germany, and the UK. Many more students hail from countries like Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Sudan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the list goes on. All across the world, as nations industrialize, they crave reach that only aviation can give. As commercial aviation explodes in places like India and China, the international demand for pilots increases. In short, our school's marketing campaign toward recruiting international students versus American students is genius.
When you sit down and talk to the students, the first thing you notice besides the broken English and an accent from whatever language they speak naturally is how normal they appear to be. They are 19-25 year old kids with a love of aviation. Many like to drink, go to the beach, and talk about girls. In fact, some of the middle east students turn the school TV on to one of the cable workout stations to look at the girls in the tight clothes. Oh, and soccer. At any given time throughout the day, students, especially those from South America, are glued to TV watching soccer.
One thing that I find interesting is that nearly every single one of them smokes. Walking out to my car, there is always a few if not 10 or 20 of them smoking in the designated smoking area. I asked one of my middle eastern students why he smokes so much. In a heavy arabic accent he said, "Chris, you know, the smoking, it keep me away from the sex." I laughed at the overweight, balding, mid-30s man with 5 kids and a wife. What he said was truly unexpected but it wasn't what I thought was keeping him away from "the sex."
One of my current students, a blond haired, blue eyed German man, is a stock trader back in Germany. He is only here to get a private license on one of his many 2-week vacations. The thick German accent makes me laugh inside because it almost seems fake. At first, I thought he was pulling my leg. I asked him how he got his job day-trading. "Afta ze college, I rezeived ahn intenship at ze Deuchbank." As he was explaining it to me, I had to take every bit of concentration to keep from openly smiling. When coming back from a cross-country, he started moving around a lot in the cockpit. I asked if he was ok. "Ya, but I need very badly to use ze restroom." So, I pushed the throttle forward and when we landed told him I'd park near the bathrooms. He looked at me and said straight faced, "Oh, its alright. The feeling it iz over." And then with a smirk nudged me his elbow and said, "But you may want to check the ze seat, ya!?" I laughed not sure if he was joking or not. It was the first time I'd seen him smile.
What I think is the most striking is the outward borderline unabashed racism that exists in other cultures. One day I was walking in from a flight and ran into a young man from London who was a student of one of my friends here. "Chris, how did your student do on his checkride?" he asked in a relatively thick London accent. I asked which one he was talking about and he replied, "You know, the colored fellow." I stopped mid-step and looked at him and laughed. I thought of him walking down the streets of Harlem and asking if anyone had seen the colored fellow he had arrived with.
I was teasing my one Sri Lankan student a few weeks ago and asking her the difference between an Indian and a Sri Lankan. In her thick British accent with tinges of what sounds to me like Indian (to my cultured friends, yes, I know it's actually Sri Lankan) she said, "Oh Chris, there are SO many differences! We are nothing alike! We are so much better than India." I asked, besides the language, what is the difference that makes you better. She said, "Oh, we are pretty much the same."
Some of the more shocking things come from an Egyptian man. I was talking to one of my students from Qatar when the Egyptian man walks up. "Chris, do not listen to him. He is from Qatar. They only have 200,000 people. If we wanted to take them over, we could. We would march our army there and put them all in one hotel. It would be no problem." He then went on, "We are not Arab. We are nothing like the Arab, we are African!" I then asked if he preferred the Nigerians over the Arabs. "No, they are not Africans. We are Africans. They black." Trying to change the subject, I asked how his flying with other students was going. He said, "Chris, you know, I flew with one guy, he black. Then, I flew with another student and he black. Every one I fly with, they black." Being fairly dark skinned himself, I asked, if he didn't like black people. "We fly at night and it get dark with them there in the cockpit. I need white so I can see and not black. They are not for me."
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