Noel B. Salazar - Autobiography

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Thirty years ago, I was born in France, of a Spanish father and a Belgian mother. My family currently lives in Bruges, a well-known Belgian tourist destination. My partents have a second residence in Churriana, a pitoresque Spanish village in between Málaga and Torremolinos (Costa del Sol, Andalucía). My parents love traveling. As a logical consequence, also our own house often opened its door for international guests. Meeting foreigners motivated me to study other languages from a very early age onward. However, as an adolescent I had quite a hard time accepting my own ‘multi-culturality’. Only at a later age I started considering my 'being different' as an asset rather than a hindrance.

As studying in Belgium is extremely cheap, my parents could afford it to send me to university. Even so, I had to struggle hard against social pressures in order to be allowed to study those subjects that really interested me (and not the ones that would lead to good-paying jobs). I chose to move to Leuven, a provincial university town near Brussels, and to study psychology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Not surprisingly, I chose to live among foreign students. I share a house together with people from countries as varied as Cuba, Argentina, Congo, Nigeria, Japan and China. I truly enjoyed the life of a student and wanted to continue my studies. A chain of coincidences made that I ended up at the University of Essex in England. There I continued studying psychology and had the chance to experience how it feels to live – as a foreigner – in another culture.

After six years of study, I felt I needed a break and opted for a sabbatical. One year long I helped the Ecumenical Community of Taizé in France to welcome youth from all over the world. It was an incredible experience to share my time with people from so many countries and cultures. The Taizé Community also sent me to Vienna, Austria, in order to help organizing a meeting for almost 100.000 young people. Taizé has left me with a huge worlwide network of friends, many of which I am hoping to visit one day. It was also the place where I met my wife, Monica Espinoza, a bright Chilean woman who worked as a physiotherapist in Ghana and Cameroon.

After having volunteered, it was time to look for a 'real' job. I had the opportunity to start an interim job in Brussels for JRS, an international refugee agency. After a few months, I was transferred to the JRS headquarters in Rome (Italy). As communications officer I had the opportunity to visit many refugee camps in different regions of the world. I often could combine my work with visits to friends or relatives living abroad. I traveled around Europe and to Mexico, Chile, Kenia, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, and India.

While being abroad, I was informed about a new Master in Cultures and Development Studies in Leuven. Both Monica and I saw it as the perfect opportunity to integrate our personal experience in a more theoretical framework. Once I was back in Belgium, I noticed how much the country had changed and how people were struggling with the more prominent ‘multicultural’ side of Belgian society. Not knowing the other – in this case the ‘foreigner’ – also means not knowing how to relate to the other. This insight convinced me of the importance of anthropological research, so as to bridge the gap between different cultures.

At the same time, I kept my engagement towards broader world problems alive while working for an international development organization in Brussels. This gave me the opportunity to travel to Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. I also participated in an interactive research project of the King Baudouin Foundation gathering young Belgians and foreigners living in Belgium in the hope to better understand the dynamics of the contact between cultures.

I started looking for constructive ways to combine my interest in traveling and cultures. After months of intensive searching, I decided to apply to American universities. Since 2002, I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. My current research involves fieldwork in Indonesia and Tanzania. I guess the rest of my website will make clear what I am doing these days...