You might be asking why I am describing this situation, and rightly so. It serves me as a metaphor for how I feel this study trip right now, a «Western» crowd, trying to understand a completely different reality to theirs, trying to experience what it means to be a «victim» of climate change, still relying on their European parameters, sometimes trying to overcome them; surrounded by so many things different to what we know; though we see and feel their reality, we somehow lack the codes to understand it all, the truth of what it means to have to deal with a life under such conditions.

Visiting a foreign country can always only be an approximation to a reality different from one’s own. But it is a very useful one: to create understanding, appreciation and empathy, to live a part of those realities we only know from books and statistics; it helps to see, that behind every number and figure, there is a person, a face, a threatened family, a destroyed home; and to see that besides all the differences we might see, it is someone like you and me.