AFS Intercultural Eyes

An Intense Homecoming

I have been planning for some time to post a story on our web site that chronicles the return journey of a young Danish woman who had a most difficult re-entry experience after her AFS year as a high school student in Kenya. Julie Gehl originally wrote this story in 1984, a few years after she had been on the AFS program. Read Julie's story on the AFS web site.

Julie's experience of Kenya left her confused about her identity as Danish. She had so fully taken on a Kenyan identity and set of values that she had a hard time finding her way back to Denmark. She returned to Kenya for a long visit to her host family and friends in Kenya, and somewhere along the line in this journey, she understands that her future is in Denmark and she finds the strength to meet the challenge of readapting to her own country again. Julie is now an oncologist in Denmark and fully participating in her own culture these days, but as she says in her story, "there will always be a little bit of Kenya in me somewhere."

Julie's experience is uniquely her own, but many exchange students will relate to the intensity of her experience, and the importance it had for her life. AFS wants every student to have a life-changing experience, and this means that going home at the end of the year can frequently be difficult. How can you return home after such an experience, and act you did before, as if you never left? Even when the home and host cultures are more similar, the changes brought on by the experience can be monumental. It is important to hold on to what has been learned and to find a carefully balanced integration with the way of life back home. Coming home is part of the journey abroad.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Back Home and Homesick

It is perhaps expected when you go abroad for a long stretch of time that you may from time to time experience homesickness -- a yearning for something familiar and comfortable, for people you know and love. Less expected, but also quite common, is the homesickness that many exchange students feel once they return home. In the course of a few months or a year, the host country, family and friends, had become so familiar and comfortable that this is the longing.

"It is my goal to go back to Ecuador as soon as possible. If I can manage to get the money together, I’ll be back there this summer."

The urgency of the homesickness for the host country can disrupt the person's ability to become re-involved with his life back home. Such feelings are much more intense than, for example, the fond memories I carry of that lovely little house we rented in Montréal once. Sometimes I imagine living again in that house, chatting with the neighbor behind us, shopping for groceries around the corner, commuting on the Metro to some job, watching the children at the playground across the street. It wouldn't be a bad life, but I'm not so dissatisfied with the life I have now to contemplate making any plans to rush back. I also have fond memories of the mountains rising around Quito in a view that can take your breath away. I hope to return to both these places sometime, but my life right now is here in New York.

Now what?

"I’m going through a period of great disillusionment with my life and my plans. Maybe because last year, I understood what it meant to invest a year of your life in something wonderful, and am now struggling to find just as valid a plan into which to plunge myself."

Of course, it's not just the fantasy of what life might be like back in the host country that can create a disruption for the returning student. It's often equally a question of how to incorporate the benefits of the intercultural experience into the life you have at home. The exchange students coming home have a new perspective on themselves, a new outlook on the world. The more profound the experience, the more time and reflection is needed to rearrange the way one gives meaning to life to include these new perspectives and multiple layers of meaning. Going through the re-entry process thoughtfully leads to a richer life.

What can parents do to help?

Most of the AFS students are in their last two years of secondary school and still depend to a great extent on the support and concern of their parents. Recently we published an article on the AFS web site that humorously and indulgently talks about the re-entry experience, addressed (in this case) to Brazilian parents and their returning teenagers. Funny, emotional, and very much to the point, THE LONG AWAITED RETURN HOME, by AFS Educational Advisory Council member Andréa Sebben and Raquel Fernandes, is written with a very Latin flavor for parents who miss their son or their daughter but may be quite surprised to meet the young man or woman who comes home. (Also available in Spanish as EL ANSIADO REGRESO A CASA).

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

War & Peace

AFS, like NAFSA, is celebrating 60 years of intercultural learning: 60 years since the end of World War II. Our organizations are expressly interested in building peace. With the presentation of the Cassandra Pyle award to AFS Ambulance Driver Ward Chamberlin, who was one of our founders, we were reminded of that war time in which Ward and many others served not as combatants but as those who rescued the wounded. On Thursday morning (May 29) we learned about another war experience: this one of a child, now a young man, who had been forced to become a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The video below shows Ishmael Beah last year, on a Canadian news show called "The Hour" but at the NAFSA plenary, Ishmael spoke mostly about what happened in his life after the war experience, when he came to the USA and went to Oberlin College, and when he wrote his book, A Long Way Gone.

I watched Ishmael on the Jumbo Tron, sitting next to a long-time friend and colleague. We heard him talk about how he came to realize how important it is to recognize that cultural differences are not as important as the fact that we are all human. My friend and looked at each other and at the same time whispered, "Minimization!"

Why Minimization? Both of us had spent long hours with Mitch Hammer and more long hours with Milton Bennett and with staff at AFS explaining the findings from Mitch's 2002 study with our students that most of the students reach a developmental stage that Milton Bennett named "Minimization" -- one in which the person minimizes cultural differences and focuses on the underlying human similarity -- in his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.

What we also learned in the research is that many of the AFS students worry about focusing on cultural differences, believing that differences create conflict, and so it's best to minimize these differences and, if possible, enlarge the similarities we share. At AFS we have spent a lot of time explaining to staff and volunteers how we would like them to challenge the students to be able to appreciate cultural differences without having these differences lead to conflict.

Yet minimization is powerful and Ishmael helped to remind us that this IS a good thing. It is how conflict is overcome. It is how one person stops dehumanizing another person, and it's no wonder that anyone who has faced violent conflict stemming from cultural differences would cling tightly to the belief that all people are ultimately the same, deep down, and that this is what is important to know and to observe.

At some point, though, the messy business of building peace requires an ability to negotiate, and to recognize how very differently another person, from another culture, experiences the world. At some point, the relationship needs to go deeper into those differences, to understand them and to build those very important differences into the dynamic of the conversations and shared activities across cultures.

Life & Death

Mitch Hammer also presented a session at NAFSA on Thursday afternoon, which was based in part on his book, Saving Lives, but translated to the context of an international student program or study abroad program at a US university. While I might complain that the information he presented -- especially the riveting case study of an international student dealing with a stalker -- was not presented with its full cultural context, Mitch definitely shook up many people in the audience and made them realize that they may need to pay more attention to the personal safety of their students to an extent that they might not have considered before. While these situations can happen as easily to a student in his or her own country and culture, there are many complications that arise when students are not in their own culture, and anyone who deals with student exchange needs to know how to approach these situations.

Theory & Practice (redux)

Darla Deardorff's "Assessment Toolbox" session provided a chance to chat with two of the four presenters who highlighted the use of particular research tools to assess intercultural competence. This could have been an entire workshop, but like a good wine tasting, it gave us a sense of which of these tools you might want to study in depth at a later time when you're ready to do some serious research.

Lisa Chappel led a very down-to-earth session on providing post-study abroad support. Lisa used to work for the AFS office in Chile and she was kind enough to provide some follow up information for our volunteers which I posted on the AFS International web site. The other presenters were also great, filled with specific ideas and programs from their own campuses.

Finally, one of my "Must Attend" sessions came when I could hardly attend at all: the very last session on the very last day. Victor Savicki, who has been one of the presenters at Darla Deardorff's morning toolbox session, organized a team presentation on using theory and measurement, but also a presentation of a fascinating on-line course that is very much the kind of thing we are hoping to do.

Coming Home

In researching the impact of the secondary school international exchange program that AFS offers, I have become increasingly aware that much of the learning that takes place as a result of an international experience happens well after the student returns home. Immigrants who do not return home – the most common type of experience for the immigrants to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – undoubtedly have a different learning path and may miss some of the kinds of learning available to the exchange student.

Many years ago we met an Italian AFS student from Rome who had recently come into contact with a branch of his family who had moved a generation or two earlier to New York. To him, these family members hardly seemed Italian, although they spoke Italian with him.

In 1991- 92, when I was interviewing Indians who had returned to India after their studies in the USA, several of those I interviewed recalled the same kind of story, and this seemed to be part of what impelled them to return home to India. To my interviewees, these American branches of their Indian families were not very modern. In fact, they seemed to be clinging ever more tightly to the Indian lifestyle as it existed in the epoch when they made their migration to the USA. Because they were living abroad, they were virtually unaware of the ongoing evolution of Indian society and mores. One of my interviewees called them “fossilized” Indians.

This may be unfair if not unkind. Immigrants living in the USA are also creating and maintaining the culture they share that includes the fact of living in the USA as well as the community of their fellow immigrants. But it is true that their ability to touch and taste the life of their homeland is limited, and that their memories of home have in some ways replaced the direct experience of home.

The AFS student who returns home may also feel a little fossilized after a year of living abroad. He or she has missed a number of critical events in the lives of those living at home, but also the physical sensation of living in the home country and community may have become unfamiliar and the memory of how live at home feels is probably never quite accurate until you are there again.

Trusting this faulty memory now, I recall an aspect of a familiar playground activity when I was growing up: jumping rope. Occasionally a boy would get involved briefly, but largely this was an activity for the girls. While two would hold the ends of a rope and swing it, the others took turns running in, jumping, and running out while not stopping the rope. Each girl had the habit of standing outside the rope for a while, watching, nodding, and often using her hands and her whole body to mark the rhythm of the rope until she could internalize it. With different girls twirling the rope or with arms getting tired, the rhythm changed constantly, so as girls left the rope and came back, they again had to watch carefully and mark the rhythm.

I think of the thousands of AFS students who will be returning home in the coming weeks. They also need to stand outside a bit and watch the rhythm of life at home. It will be so familiar and yet not so. Many will even stumble over a few words in their own language, or start speaking to their parents in the now familiar Norwegian or Thai or Italian instead of their native language. It may take a while to understand what has happened, since they had not before tried to leave and return to this rhythm that was so natural to them before they went abroad.

And so the journey for the AFS returnee begins here, again, where it started, and where there is still so much to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

For AFS Volunteers a new section on the AFS International web site (www.afs.org) offers a special focus on intercultural resources and ideas to support your work. Currently the focus is on "coming home" and re-entry orientation.

Leo Hitchcock, a frequent guest blogger here on Intercultural Eyes, has recently traveled  halfway around the world. Back in New Zealand now, he sent in this report in which he ties his own visceral experience of two different "worlds" to some of the concepts of Edward Hall.

Worlds apart: Saigon cf. Scandinavia

Recently I visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), followed by Copenhagen (Denmark), and Kristianstad, a small town in southern Sweden – in the same week. It was such a contrast it was almost double-culture shock! First that Ho Chi Minh City was so different to Auckland, New Zealand, then Scandinavia being so different again – two ends of a spectrum, with Auckland somewhere in the middle.

What immediately struck me is the difference in territoriality and exploitation. These are two (of ten) cultural Primary Message Systems (PMS) that control cultural norms and values (Hall, [1959] 1981). Territoriality establishes personal, community, and societal territory, or the use of space, including the rules associated with personal space of, or between, individuals. Exploitation controls the rules and practices associated with the use of tools and the environment as extensions of societal and individual needs. In a way these two PMS have some parallels.

Territoriality

Ho Chi Minh City: Much commerce in Ho Chi Minh City is carried out on the roadside. Stores have ‘touts’ with the objective of luring people inside or to the store. Many hundreds of stalls are set up on the sidewalk itself, even right on the kerbside to lure the riders of the seemingly thousands upon thousands of motor cycles and scooters tearing about. Even motor cycles and scooters claim territory not rightly theirs, for example they will ride the opposite side of the road or the sidewalk to avoid heavy traffic and/or red lights. And unless they are stopped at a red light (but one still needs to watch for vehicles coming through), traffic does not yield at pedestrian crossings at all – one must ‘run the gauntlet’ and dodge the vehicles (mainly motor cycles and scooters) tearing past. One can buy anything (anything!) off the street – including little dogs (please don’t ask!), other animals such as little piglets, all kinds of birds including crows, and many, many things – some things I just did now know what they were. Getting into one’s personal space is not an issue to the determined tout. If one gets too close to a store, especially in the markets, one is physically grabbed by the arm and quite forcefully dragged into their space and ‘worked over’ for a buy.

Copenhagen & Kristianstad: There are market stalls, but not on the roadside as such but in designated market areas such as a town square, with goods for sale limited to curios, souvenirs, crafts, food, and the like. There are no touts trying to lure you to these market stalls, nor into the stores. Traffic - and pedestrians! - are almost completely law-abiding, observing all the traffic and crossing signals. In the cobbled shopping precinct areas, vehicles even yield to pedestrians – unheard of in Ho Chi Minh City! When one enters a store space, one is cheerfully greeted but not ‘set upon’, and then politely attended to once one indicates a purchase is a possibility.

Exploitation

One can glean from the above that exploitation of the shopper’s dollar is a primary objective in the markets of Ho Chi Minh City, and exploitation of the available land for stalls and extensions to stores is also prevalent. In one street I walked along the store front had been extended out so far that there was no sidewalk left to walk on, and stepping onto the road in such traffic is not to be taken lightly! However, everything is neat, clean and tidy, and ‘in its place’ in Scandinavia. It is also much, much quieter! I believe ‘bargaining’ falls within this PMS, as bargaining is exploitation of the shopper’s available dollars on the one hand, and exploitation of the seller’s margins on the other. No bargaining in Scandinavia, well, not generally anyway. In Ho Chi Minh City however, bargaining is the norm in many stores, especially in the markets, and even some taxis and other forms of transport. It is interesting haggling over a low cost item. The exchange rate is 16,000:1 $US. This means that one can spend several minutes haggling over the difference between 50,000 and 35,000 for an item, if successful thereby getting a reduction in the buy price of 15,000 – less than $US1 !

Oh, where’s the sidewalk gone?	Mmm, how do I get across here?
Oh, where’s the traffic?	Everything clean, tidy, and in its place.

Primary Message Systems

Territoriality and Exploitation are just two of 10 cultural Primary Message Systems identified by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall ([1959] 1981). It is within these 10 PMS that study abroad sojourners will experience cultural difference, and, probably, some culture shock. The others are:

· Interaction: Interaction lies at the hub of culture and everything grows from it. This represents all forms of communication including linguistic interaction.

· Association: Association establishes social networks within communities. Levels of status are established within this PMS. Hall, ([1959] 1981: 38-40) refers to this as the ‘pecking order’.

· Subsistence: This PMS controls nutritional requirements along with the rituals and rules associated with food and eating. This PMS also establishes the norms and ‘rules’ around status and manual labor.

· Bisexuality: Like food, a basic necessity of life is the reproduction of the species. This PMS establishes the rituals and rules associated with the differentiation of both form and function (bisexuality) of reproduction, and the genders, that is the rules associated with what men can and cannot do, and with what women can and cannot do.

· Temporality: Temporality establishes the rules associated with cycles and rhythms. For example; the division of society by age, mealtimes, and tempos of speech, all of which vary by culture.

· Learning and Acquisition: A basic activity of life, this PMS includes the acquisition of one’s own cultural PMS (enculturation), shared behaviours and ways of living, and the required knowledge and skills. It also includes acculturation - the acquiring of a new culture’s ways of living. This PMS includes formal, informal, and technical learning.

· Play: Establishes the rules around the use of humor, competition through games, and degrees of enjoyment.

· Defence: This relates to the need for defence against hostile forces of external societies, within society, within the environment, within nature, and within the individual. The bases for the organization and content of religion and of medicines and cures arise from the latter two.

Ref: Hall, Edward T.; [1959] 1981, The Silent Language. Random House: U.S.A & Canada.