Life in city vs. rural area

Living in small city in Iraq and moving to Virginia in United States is similar to moving from rural city in American to Virginia. The differences between the two put me in cultural shock for almost six months. Talking about differences does not mean only in size but in every aspects of the life. The most important differences I would like to discuss in the paper is; in term of social, health, and economic.

I bought my in Virginia in April 2008, and I live there since then, but until this moment I do not know even the name of the person who lives next door. One week ago there are couples living in the house on the right hand sight of my house, passed by my house while I was working in the front yard and they told me “HI”. That was the first time someone greeting me at that neighborhood. Compared with where I lived, I knew every single family and their kids not only in our block but also three blocks away from my house in each direction. If someone in the neighborhood was getting sick, other people went and visit him and they share happy and sad moments together.

Since 2005 when first time I come to American until this moment, I have been hospitalized 6 times, and I must visit family doctor every six month. I left Iraq and I am 35 years old, I never went to hospital, I never been ill. Many times I argue with my friends about this particular subject. Simply in the United State food and drink is processed nothing is natural, while in Iraq I remember the guy we used to by vegetables from him, he own that farm and he was selling everything from his farm, they were natural. Another point about health was, we never had transportation, and we used to walk that was a good sport. In the US we do not walk, use our car to go even for short distances.

The last point I would like to talk about is economic. Many times my friends asking me if I missed my old life, honestly I say: NO. Economic was very bad in small cities, we was living excluding every kind of entertainments from our life to survive. People in small city, keep one job and stick with it until they retire because finding another job is really hard. There is more prosperity in big city and it is easy to find a new job.

There are many differences between life in rural area and big cities. It is hard to say which one is better, because each has it is own flavor. However, we can compare the two in term of social, health, and economically.