When you have been immersed in a culture your whole life, you take for granted the layers of shared history and understanding you have with others. The ease with which you navigate familiar surroundings and social conventions is natural and comfortable. But what happens when you plop yourself down in the middle of an ancient culture on the other side of the world?
Now that we are less than a month out from being immigrants in another country, my sense of these things is heightened in our own culture. How must it feel for the newly arrived when they are sitting in a group of English-speaking people, with southern accents, telling jokes that only make sense if you used to watch Saturday Night Live in the 1970s in America? Or what about weird social norms of which they are completely unaware? There are so many things about growing up and living in America that people who did not grow up here will just never be aware of. And the same is true, of course, for every other culture on earth.
How will it feel to be the minority? To be left out of conversations? To not be aware of social norms? To not know the language at all? I am leaving myself wide open to those experiences, and am going to allow them to expand my version of myself, and my understanding of the world, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous! It's that oh-my-god-here-we-go kind of nervous that revs me up and heightens my senses, but it's exhausting. It also makes the next 4 weeks seem like an eternity....
 |
| Almost at capacity! |
