The Mirror I Didn’t Recognize
In late 2009, I went on a trip to Switzerland. Even now, I’m not entirely sure who funded it — maybe Switzerland, maybe the EU; I’m fairly certain it wasn’t my home country, Serbia. The whole thing felt slightly mysterious, as if someone somewhere had decided that a group of teenagers from Serbia needed to be exported for a few weeks and exposed to fresh air, mountains, and European values. The purpose of the stay was for us to meet pupils from Switzerland, to interact, to learn about tolerance from one another. Even that part I didn’t fully grasp before we left. I hadn’t realized there would be workshops from morning until evening, or that we would spend entire days talking about what tolerance actually means, how it works, and why it matters.
The first day we arrived, they handed us an A2 sheet of paper and asked us to write down our opinions about Swiss people. I still remember what we wrote: only the most positive things — that they were polite, kind, self‑aware, the sort of answers you give when you’re trying to be both diplomatic and genuinely appreciative. We were guests, after all. We were raised to be grateful, to behave, to show our best selves when abroad. And besides, we didn’t really know anything about Swiss people beyond clichés about chocolate, watches, and punctuality. So we wrote what we thought was expected of us, what felt safe and generous and harmless.
But when we saw what the Swiss pupils had written about us, the shock hit with a force I can still feel in my body today. Not everything was negative; they also wrote that we were nice, for example. But scattered among the compliments were words that felt like small blows: that we were gangsters, that we strutted around with Gucci bags, that we got facial operations. It was such a strange mixture of stereotypes and misunderstandings that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to disappear into myself. Mostly, I just felt exposed — as if someone had held up a mirror I didn’t recognize. A mirror that reflected not who we were, but who we were imagined to be.
My first instinct was to remind myself who I actually was: certainly not a gangster, certainly not someone parading around with a Gucci bag, and certainly not someone who would ever consider a facial operation. None of it resembled me in the slightest, and yet there it was — written in thick marker on an A2 sheet of paper, as if someone had taken a quick snapshot of us from a distance and mistaken the blur for the whole picture. It was unsettling to see yourself through the eyes of someone who had never spoken to you, never sat next to you, never heard your voice. It was unsettling to realize how quickly a stranger can decide who you are.
These kids were twelve, and they were honest about their prejudices. There was no malice in it, just the unfiltered certainty of children who had absorbed stories about “the Balkans,” with or without ever having met anyone from there. They weren’t trying to hurt us; they were simply repeating what they thought they knew. And yet, standing there in that bright Swiss classroom, looking at those words written in thick marker, I felt something shift — a small, sharp awareness of how easily people can be misread when seen only from a distance.
Later that day, during one of the workshops, a facilitator asked us to talk about how it felt to read those descriptions. I remember sitting in a circle, the Swiss kids on one side, the Serbian kids on the other, and feeling a strange mixture of defensiveness and embarrassment. I didn’t want to seem overly sensitive, but I also didn’t want to pretend that the words hadn’t stung. When it was my turn to speak, I said something polite and vague, something about misunderstanding and cultural differences. But inside, I was thinking: Is this really how we look to them? Is this what they see when they hear the word “Serbia”?
Fortunately, other pupils from Serbia were more honest than I was. One boy said, simply and bravely: “I felt hurt by these words. I don’t think of myself as a gangster, and I prefer not to be called that.” His voice didn’t tremble; he wasn’t dramatic. He just told the truth. And somehow, that truth opened the room.
What surprised me most was how quickly the Swiss kids apologized once they realized the impact of their words. They were genuinely confused that we were hurt. “But we didn’t mean it badly,” one girl said, her face flushed with worry. “We just thought… that’s how it is.” And in that moment, I understood something that no workshop could have taught me: that prejudice often comes wrapped in innocence, that stereotypes can be passed down like bedtime stories, and that people can repeat them without ever questioning their origins.
The rest of the week unfolded in a gentler way. We played games, visited museums, and slowly replaced the caricatures with real faces, real voices, real personalities. By the end of the trip, the word “gangster” had become a running joke among us — not because it was funny, but because humor was the only way to soften the sting. And yet, even as we laughed, I carried the memory of that first day with me, the shock of seeing myself misrepresented so confidently by people who barely knew I existed.
Looking back now, I realize that the trip did teach me something about tolerance, though not in the way the organizers intended. It taught me that tolerance is not just about accepting others; it’s also about confronting the stories we inherit, the shortcuts our minds take, the assumptions we don’t even realize we’re making. It taught me that being seen inaccurately can be painful, but it can also be illuminating. And it taught me that sometimes, the first step toward understanding is simply acknowledging that we don’t know each other as well as we think we do.
