These are the parameters for this essay:
"What are the differences between your culture of origin and your host culture? Do these differences match your pre-departure expectation? Discuss the divergence in patterns of thinking, communication, problem solving, perception, and concept of time."
Like I mentioned before, I’m hard pressed to tell which is which. However, there are differences among them so I should be able to say something. It will probably be easiest to divide them into two categories: American and other. The two Alaskan cultures, even though technically in the US, will count as the latter.
American culture is entirely too stressed out. Everything has to be done right now; however, for most things, if you stand back and think about them, they’re really not that important. I think part of the problem might be the rampant individualism. Americans seem to be incapable of grasping the big picture. Instead, it’s more about self promotion achieved by the stomping on of others. I sometimes wonder if there’s something about the idea of identifying one’s self in terms of a community that may disqualify this from being a legitimate culture. Does an aggregate of egos count?
And then there’s the opposite extreme found in Southern Brazil. We had just moved down there over Christmas break from the Amazon Jungle. In that region, I had been going to an English speaking school in the city of Belem. We had six-week Christmas vacations, but this time, it got extended just a bit more.
When we arrived in Barretos, we found that there were no similar schools in the area. And because our parents wouldn’t send us away to a boarding school, they opted for a correspondence course, which was to be mailed from the States. We waited…
In the mean time, we found a house to live in that was across the street from the church in which we would be working. The property was surrounded by a wall, as most others were. If someone came to visit, they would not knock (they wouldn’t just come in either). Instead, they would stand outside of the gate on the sidewalk and clap. […and waited..] Sometimes they would opt to use the doorbell. But, when they did, we had to make it a point not to answer right away. The reason that they normally stood outside and clapped was that it was considered impolite to enter walled in property. However, the doorbell was situated where most doorbells are-next to the door (some houses had them outside the gate, but this often led to run-by ringings). The trick then was to allow them enough time to get back outside of the gate and stand there as though they had never entered the yard.
There was another missionary family, the Wood’s, living in the same town who had a son in the same grade that I was. We had decided that he would do just as well to take the correspondence course with me. His mother would then teach my youngest sister. So the expected package included books for him as well.
Besides the church across the street, we also spent Sundays working in two churches in Colina, a town about 20 minutes from Barretos. A lot of the communication problems came there, in the language itself. While my sisters and I picked it up fairly easily, my parents had a harder time. Hence, we had church services with teachings along the line that the Wise Men came to worship the naked Jesus (substituting the English new, which sounds like the Portuguese nu, for the Portuguese novo), Christ is our avocado (mispronouncing adivogado, which means advocate. Only those who spoke English caught this one), and we are gathered together to wash God (lavar-to wash, instead of louvar-to praise).
Sometimes the right word was used but we were unaware of the idioms. I once told an older gentleman that, if he were going to continue to talk to me, he would have to stop using so much profanity. He wasn’t doing this, of course: the words were simply larger words that I hadn’t learned yet. So I told him that I didn’t understand all the big words-palavraos, which, of course, meant that he was swearing at me.
Mrs. Wood went to the post office one day to mail something. The clerk looked at her and said, “Voce e Americana?” “Sim,” she answered. And, because she was an American, he gave her a box from the States that had been sitting there for two or three months. Christmas break was over in early June.
Posted by kcourter at abril 10, 2004 1:26 AM