My parents moved to the United Kingdom in 1987; my father must have been 26 at the time and my mother just 23. They moved there having seen precious little of the world. They had been abroad just a few times before they emigrated. They had probably only seen people who were culturally and physically different to them a handful of times at most.

My dad was studying really hard but since his training was taking place all over Britain, it was decided that the best course of action would be for us to live in hospital accommodation so that we wouldn’t have the added burden of having to pay mortgages on houses that we would only live in for a short while.

This meant that we would live in flats situated in buildings with a lot of other flats also housing the families of other training doctors.

The thing is the only other doctors who were leaving their own countries to study abroad were from Pakistan, India, Africa and the USSR.

You do not have to understand to love, nor do you have to understand to accept- Anna Marie Galea

Instead of crying, panicking and asking to come home, my very young mother flew in the face of her limited life experience and would smile at any woman of any colour and nationality she’d meet in the corridor, and pretty soon, these same women who could barely speak a word of English would knock on our door and bring their gifts of food. In some cases, it was their only way of communicating, but the fact that my mum had smiled at them gave them comfort thousands of miles away from their own homes and friends.

This is how I grew up. We ate with these people, we cried with these people, we celebrated feasts with these people. At Christmas, we would exchange presents; at Diwali we would go to their houses; during Ramadan my mother would take care of the children if their parents were tired or had planned to break their fast with their religious communities. Their music, their cultures, their food and their beliefs have only served to enrich my life.

I have not been made any less ‘Maltese’ or indeed less myself because of them: if anything, I have been made much, much richer. And this is why I am writing this article today.

The past few weeks have brought up a lot of questions about what it means to be Maltese and what can be done to make our situation as an already overpopulated country better. The truth is a simple one: you do not have to understand to love, nor do you have to understand to accept.

The world as we know it is changing, more people than ever before will be arriving on our shores in the next few years and we need to stop being afraid of this.

We should not allow our country to become a series of ghettos where hatred is rife on both sides of the fence, and we can only do that by looking for common ground and actively deciding to smile at our fellow human neighbour.

We need to stop being afraid of what we believe is going to be taken from us and embrace all that we can be.

We seem to have forgotten how many of our heavily discriminated forefathers boarded ships and boats headed all around the world in search of better lives. Every time you phone your cousin in Australia or your aunt in Canada, it would do good for you to remember that.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.