{"id":7687,"date":"2026-04-29T09:09:36","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/?p=7687"},"modified":"2026-04-29T09:09:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:09:40","slug":"speaking-with-strangers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/speaking-with-strangers\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking with Strangers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pictured: Traditional Moroccan meal. Media Provided by Cassie B. ’26. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, behind my phone case, an old sushi receipt with Good Luck written on it in a hurried pen. I didn\u2019t write those words, and I didn\u2019t pay for the meal at a Sushi restaurant in Cambridge, England. A woman sitting next to me had watched me study the menu with the kind of concentrated embarrassment that comes from trying to make math look somewhat casual. I was circling prices in my head, counting coins, eliminating possibilities. She asked me what my story was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I laughed, mostly because the question felt so out of place in the setting. A fluorescent sushi place. Soy sauce packets. Me trying not to reveal that I was short a few dollars. \u201cI don\u2019t have one,\u201d I said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou do,\u201d she said. \u201cYou just don\u2019t recognize it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sentence has followed me around because it rearranges something I thought I knew. We are told, from an early age, that strangers are dangerous at best and an inconvenience at worst. Don\u2019t talk to them. Don\u2019t engage. Don\u2019t make yourself available. In a city, this hardens into a kind of civic performance. Everyone is visible, no one is acknowledged. To move efficiently through public life is to become fluent in strategic indifference. There are good reasons for this, especially for women and anyone who has learned that openness can be mistaken for permission. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is still something bleak about the fact that one of the defining rules of modern life is that we are meant to encounter other people at close range and, as much as possible, remain untouched by them. And yet, some of the most important things that have happened to me began with strangers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This spring break, I met Abdel in Morocco. He took me through the Atlas Mountains, then invited me to his family\u2019s house, where I ate couscous and traditional Berber Moroccan food. What could have been a generic tourist experience, a pleasant guide, a scenic route, and a few historical facts recited on schedule, became instead a day structured by his story. He told me where he came from, the town where he grew up (ten hours away from the nearest hospital in Marrakech), and how he supported his family of ten by sending money home. He told me that out of his town of roughly 800 people, he was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to attend university. He studied History and learned English, French, and Arabic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What struck me wasn\u2019t just that Abdel was knowledgeable, though he most definitely was, or generous, though he was that too. It was that he seemed to understand history as something lived before it is ever recorded. He talked about the Berber identity, language, the Moroccan monarchy, class, social codes, and the shape of power in Morocco, all with a kind of lived experience and fluency that makes any official narratives seem instantly inadequate. A country, when described by institutions, can feel flat and declarative. A country, when described by someone who has had to live inside its contradictions, becomes complicated and real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on that experience, I was reminded of someone else: Thomas Patrick, whom I met during spring break of my sophomore year in Belfast, Ireland. If you know me, you know how interested I am in Irish History, especially the civil rights movement that preceded the Troubles and the Troubles themselves. But that interest did not begin in a classroom, did not begin with a book, and did not even begin with Derry Girls<\/em>, although I do love Derry Girls<\/em>. It began because I met a stranger, Thomas Patrick, who took me around Belfast and showed me the peace walls, prison sites, Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, and the physical residue of the conflict. Like Abdel, he did not simply narrate a place. He narrated a life inside that place. He told me about growing up Catholic, about his family\u2019s financial struggles during the Troubles, about trying to get by in a society where politics was not an abstraction but an atmospheric condition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is something transformative about being told history by the people whose bodies and families have absorbed it. It destabilizes the fantasy that the world is made up of neatly separate categories \u2013 tourist and local, student and guide, observer and subject, self and stranger. Thomas Patrick did not just teach me about Belfast. He gave shape to an obsession that has since become one of the most sustained intellectual passions of my life. Years later, I am still reading, researching, and writing about the North of Ireland, which means that some part of my inner life can be traced back to the decision to listen to someone I did not know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what I keep coming back to. A stranger is just a person whose significance to you has not yet been revealed. That is all. Not every encounter will be profound. Many should remain brief; some should remain avoided. I am not arguing for indiscriminate openness, or for abandoning the instincts that keep people safe. But I do think there is a loss built into the way we now move through the world, assuming that the unknown person is irrelevant until proven otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because sometimes a stranger does not merely help you. Sometimes they alter the architecture of your attention. They show you what to care about. They give you a new subject to love, a new place to understand, and a new way of locating yourself among other people. Sometimes they make the world feel less like a grid of transactions and more like a web of possible relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

People\u2019s stories are only one question away. This is such a simple fact that it can sound naive. But it has not been naive in my life; it has been formative. A woman in a sushi shop saw me at a moment when I felt small and asked for my story as if she assumed I had one. Abdel opened his world to me in Morocco. Thomas Patrick opened Belfast, and then all of Irish history, in a way that changed me permanently. None of these people owed me anything. That is part of what makes their attention feel so radial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that is why talking to strangers matters. Not because every stranger contains a lesson, but because some of them do, and there is no way to know in advance which ones will hand you a new way of seeing. Sometimes the world changes through institutions, disasters, ideologies, and technologies. And sometimes, it changes because someone you were never supposed to know decides, for an hour or an afternoon, to tell you who they are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will always carry the recipe with Good Luck scribbled across it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cassie B. \u201826, the author, is the Editor-in-Chief of<\/em> The Grace Gazette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pictured: Traditional Moroccan meal. Media Provided by Cassie B. ’26. There is, behind my phone case, an old sushi receipt with Good Luck written on it in a hurried pen.… Continue reading “Speaking with Strangers”<\/span> <\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":7688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,984,16,7],"tags":[180],"appful":[],"class_list":["post-7687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-inteviews","category-special-sections","category-school","tag-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9uEnr-1ZZ","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Screenshot-2026-04-29-at-10.07.59-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7689,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7687\/revisions\/7689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7687"},{"taxonomy":"appful","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gracegazette.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/appful?post=7687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}