Culture Shock

Culture shock is not pretty or pleasant, but without going through it, none of my perspectives would have changed.  The purpose of an exchange would never be achieved. Culture shock, to be honest, is nothing like I thought it would be.  I imagined it like this—You go to Tanzania in the Peace Corps, are living in a straw hut with no water and limited electricity.   Men, women, and children work 14-hour days, with the sole purpose being survival and passing on a better life to the next generation.  You finally realize how different their perspectives, goals, and desires are, and how wide the economic gap has grown.  Why should you, an 18-year-old American, have such a different and more privileged life?

So yeah… call me dumb, but when I think of culture shock, that’s what comes to mind.  And, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. But, what I’ve found is something different. The biggest differences are sometimes the easiest to deal with.  You spot them, identify them, and realize that you’ll just have to accept them or you wont survive in your new destination.  I accepted the fact that I would see more poverty in the states.  It bothers me to see it, but I have to deal with it.  I accepted the fact that women and men have different social statuses here.  My sister and I clean the house, my brother fixes the car.  When I offer to help bring in groceries, I’m usually denied or given the lightest bags.  It’s different, but I’m not here to support women’s rights or equality.  I’m here to learn about Ecuador and learn about myself.  Culture shock, for me, are those days when I come home from school, drag myself upstairs, and miss all of the people and things that were so familiar.  When I miss understanding all the ropes.--never being surprised by some quirk that I had no idea existed.  Just knowing how everything works, how to communicate what I want, and how to get people to understand me 100%. 

For the most part, I’ve dealt pretty well with all of it.   I’m a flexible person.  I’m adaptable. But every now and then something just gets under my skin.   The fact that my religious beliefs aren’t very accepted can get a little uncomfortable. The fact that I have to dress up more when I go out sometimes seems a little strange.  But what I’ve learned is—the point isn’t to stick 100% to your own beliefs and values.  You have to put yourself in the shoes of the Ecuadorians--think of their lives from the time they were infants.  You can’t just try to understand their perspective from your own viewpoint.  You have to leave behind your cultural values, ideas, and upbringing, and look through theirs.  For example, I’ve learned to accept the fact that my parents will ask the last name of every one of my friends to make sure that they know the family. I realized that it’s because they just want to look out for me, and that in this culture, the people you go out with define your reputation. They don’t do it because they don’t trust me or because they’ll only let me go out with a certain class of people.  As my papi once told me—“Todos pagan por uno.”  I’m not sure if those were exactly the right words, but it’s basically that if one person in a group does something, everyone pays.  If some exchange students have a bad reputation, we all do.  If a group of my classmates has a reputation for drinking and I go out with them for one night, I’ll start to build the same reputation.

Another example that’s a little clearer---when I first got here, I was shocked by the difference in social status between men and women.  When I wasn’t allowed to carry heavier grocery bags, I would feel sort of angry and cheated.  But—I looked through the eyes of my brother or my dad.  They thought that they were being chivalrous and nice.  They were accepting the jobs that no one really wanted.  From their perspective, they were respecting me much more by taking those jobs than by letting me do them.  

I’m rambling. Anyway, getting back to this whole thing—THE POINT OF AN EXCHANGE.  You jump out of your comfort zone. You realize that even if you call yourself a liberal, free thinker, you aren’t.  I think it is impossible to realize how much our society affects us until we’ve gone to look beyond it, and had the audacity to question all of those things that we never even realize we took for granted.  It makes us rethink what we want to do with our time here and how we view ourselves in the context of our world.  Not only have I experienced that by putting myself in the shoes of the Ecuadorians, but just being out of my old town and in a completely new group of friends has changed my perspectives.  The exchange students in my town are always hanging out, and just being around them forces me to look at things differently.

So, what more can I say but thank you to all of the people who’ve made this happen for me.  They told us in orientations that we might get to our new host country and wonder what the heck we’re doing there and why we ever signed up.  I can say that I’ve never wondered.  I’ve had my moments of frustration—can’t say I enjoy being charged triple for taxis or being served soup with a duck foot sticking out of it—but there is this underlying point to being here that I don’t let myself forget.