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| Originally Posted by Marmot If you are lucky you can find crew who are not so bigoted as to believe national origin makes them better people in some way, or even worse, believe that their national origin makes them "ethnocentric" and not worth hiring. |
I don’t doubt that there are many qualified and capable Americans that I could hire as crew. I suppose that if I my expectations of a crew were to simply wash my boat and cook and serve my food then there really wouldn’t be any issue about hiring only American’s. However, I want more from my world-cruising experience and I hope to share a greater opportunity with my guests and my crew.
I grew up in an affluent community in California where most everyone I knew had a pool, a BMW and a view. California culture was and still is a huge national and international export. For me and most of my peers the height of multiculturalism was Cinco de Mayo day at school where local car clubs bounced their low riders and we were served Tacos for lunch.
At nineteen I moved to Canada to work for two years in Alberta and British Columbia. There I met other youth from all around the world, plus a lot of Canadians. I lived with a Scot who had tattooed the Dundee United foo’e ball logo on his wrist, taught me the Wellington Gum Boot song and lots of Scottish Drinking songs like this ditty:
Now Campbeltown Loch is a beautiful place,
But the price of the whisky is grim.
How nice it would be if the whisky was free
And the Loch was filled up to the brim.
I loved being in Edmonton the night the Edmonton Oilers won their first Stanley Cup playoff and being on Jasper Avenue when thousands turned out for the biggest party I’ve ever been to. I loved my Argentinean roommate with the most beautiful mother I had ever seen and his disdain for vegetables and his amazing grilling abilities. I loved my British friend who would eat sugar with a spoon directly from the bag, taught me how to eat chips drowned in malt vinegar and sharing his collection of British pop culture novels with me. I loved haggis, Mountain Goat burgers, gelatin made from a little rubbery cube and kids that would wake up in the middle of the night to check their beaver traps to sell the glands to perfume companies as a way to augment their college fund.
I didn’t have nearly as much to share with them since they knew what my California lifestyle was like since they’d seen it on TV and in the movies for so many years. It’s too bad that my California culture taught me so little about the rest of the world all around.
My employer, an American, often complained about the difficulty he had in getting us American’s to live peacefully with non-Americans. For him it was a continual barrage of complaints and problems over how weird and unusual the non-American roommates were. I’ve always felt what a shame it was that so many of my American friends missed out on such an amazing opportunity.
While in college my closest friend, after living two years in Québec and becoming fluent in French, majored in German and spent summers living abroad in Switzerland, Brazil and China. While in Switzerland, he worked at a boarding school where he was the only American. He loved the opportunity to delve into the culture and language far deeper than he could have in the midst of other Americans and actively sought out the opportunity to see the world through their eyes. (I was a boring Statistics Major and spent my summers in So Cal and Hawaii.)
In college I had a roommate from Yap, Micronesia. The first time he wore clothes was around 12 when puberty kicked in and he had pictures of his mother and sister sitting topless on a grass mat, that he had hanging on his bedroom wall. He tells the story of spending a week drinking heavily on a small neighboring island with no phone access. When he returned home his mother had been mourning his death and was preparing for his funeral since the last time he was seen was playing in the surf where some sharks were known to be.
I know what American’s think. I am one and I live around thousands of them. I grew up with Gilligan’s Island, Calvin Klein, Top Gun and 50 cent …and so have most of you.
Last summer I met the richest man I’ve ever met in my life. No, he’s not my wealthy Canadian friend that made his first 100 million at age 27 yet is one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. Nor is my friend that sold his company for millions and then tried to kill himself six months later.
At age four this man began making bricks under the hot Indian sun from sun up to sun down, seven days a week. For generations that is what his poor family did in complete destitute poverty, where the debts of his fathers were passed down to him-- a situation of modern-day slavery. He now lives in the US in a working-class neighborhood near the airport where him and his wife work different shifts at a local printing press and earn around twelve dollars an hour. I asked him about his “American Experience” one day as he was preparing to drive to Las Vegas for the weekend. He held up his car key and said, “In my country I could have saved my entire life and I could never have afforded this key. But in America, not only do I get the key, but I get the whole car.” I don’t know too many native-born American’s who have that perspective, do you?
Only an American would say that Americans are not ethnocentric. It’s not a problem that we see our world through the eyes of our culture, but for my travels, I want to see the world not through the MTV generations eyes, but through the eyes of those who see the world from a perspective very different than mine.
That's a pretty good answer 
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