Navigating another culture
Here's Guest Dad Joe Burris on lessons about helping kids navigate in a foreign land -- and helping people from elsewhere navigate ours:
One of my friends from West Africa is fond of saying that you can always tell an American who has experienced the world outside his or her borders. Earlier this week, while I working at a do-it-yourself office supply store in D.C., I got a sense of what he means.
The loud and somewhat disruptive chatter of the place was suddenly quieted by a man who kept requiring assistance but spoke little English. The workers had little patience for him, and nearby patrons weren’t much better.
When he asked a woman sitting next to me to help, she declined. She then leaned over to me and whispered, “He’s getting on my nerves.”
The moment reminded me of the first time I tried to use a self-service laundry near my wife’s home in Soweto, South Africa. I scarcely understood the symbols on the machines. As I tried to figure them out, the laundry operator and the other customers stared at me with amusement and whispered too each other, but would offer no assistance.
Before I knew it one of the machines overflowed with suds. A patron walked over to me and said, “You put too much soap powder in!”...
Finally, I said to myself, someone to talk to.
“Well,” I replied, “what do these symbols …”
“Sorry,” she interjected. “I don’t speak much English.”
My daughters have been to their mother’s home country throughout much of their lives. We often go as a family but, when the price makes it prohibitive to do so, I encourage my wife to take them without me.
For me, it’s important that they not only maintain a sense of their South African heritage, but that they also understand what it feels like to be in an unfamiliar place, and how to navigate their ways through it.
Or better still that they grow up having sympathy for those who struggle to navigate through those moments, and, if the opportunity presents itself, offer help _ as I did for the man in the office store.
As it turned out, all he wanted to know was how to place type in boldface and italics on Microsoft Word. He smiled with relief when I showed him what to do.
As I departed, other patrons stared at me as if I was from another world.
And maybe I am.
Comments
Thank you for being kind and helping somone in need.
Posted by: Sarah | May 7, 2010 10:56 AM
Thanks for that perspective, Joe Burris. My husband and I lived in Europe for more than two years when we were first married. It never ceased to amaze me how American tourists would get on the tram and talk loudly, assuming that no one could understand them--but most people understood every word they were saying.
Posted by: Dahlink | May 8, 2010 7:45 AM