What is a border, really? When I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, I could see State Line Road out our kitchen window, a street that straddled the border between Kansas and Missouri. I never bothered to wonder how the two states coordinated the street paving, but we were impressed with the idea that we could stand in the middle of the street with a foot in each state, traffic permitting.

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While cleaning out some files the other day, I came across an old article by Michael Paige in that strange blue-violet type made by a ditto machine. I realized that part of the educational value of the piece, in addition to whatever Michael had written, was its iconic value as a representation of the culture of education in the baby boomer years....

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“And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.”

Kathy’s Song. Paul Simon.

I often marvel at how young Paul Simon was when he wrote this song, but it has haunted me for years, particularly these lines, with the stark emptiness of doubt in everything except for the one person for whom the song is written: Kathy, I presume. What impressed me most was the possibility of such a complete emotional upheaval that would leave a person clinging desperately to one other person, with no other bearings. The intensity fit my teenage years, but not too closely, because at that point in my life I did believe I could change the world, or that young people would change the world. Much of that optimism stays with me, but now also much of the doubt.

My first real encounter with another culture was my exchange experience in France at 17. I am rather amused to remember my efforts to connect with a street corner revolutionary just across the border in Germany where I traveled with my host family. He was handing out some kind leaflet, and I knew immediately that we both belonged to the same worldwide youth movement. My French was reasonable enough, but I still don’t speak German. My host family stood patiently by while I tried to make this important connection in a pigeon English. We traded revolutionary leaflets as one might now exchange business cards. My host family ushered me back into the car and of course I never saw that guy again.

The complete confidence I had in whatever it was that I believed at age 17 served me well in some ways, but it did not leave me very open to the cultural differences I encountered. I held my views a bit too strongly, and judged quickly. Openness requires some doubt about your own perspective, and at that age I didn’t see the value of doubting what seemed self-evident to me.

I needed very much to balance my certainty about the world with some serious doubt: to have a willingness to explore the possibility that what I know from my own perspective may simply not be true. Where certainty brings strength, doubt brings vulnerability, but it can also yield to openness, wonder, curiosity, and the realization that there is so much more to learn.

Next week as I leave the daily contact with my colleagues at AFS and start on a new journey, I welcome the doubt that is creeping in as a counterweight to the confidence in what I have learned so far and where I am heading, and I welcome the new and renewed relationships that bring me new perspectives to ponder.

Next week also this site will have a new look as I move it to WordPress.com. Click here for a sneak preview. You will still find it at http://www.interculturaleyes.org and I will provide links from the current site to help you find it.

When I was very young, my grandfather's cousin Sue relayed a story about an American woman friend who was living in London as an ex-patriot for a time. An issue that came up for this woman was her worry that she instinctively used an American approach to apologies when riding the London "Tube" instead of the British approach. So whenever she accidentally stepped on someone's foot or bumped into someone on the Tube, she automatically said, "Oh, Excuse me!" The British, she observed, always seemed to say simply "Sorry!" in the same situation. Months passed, and then one day when she happened to step on a stranger's foot, she suddenly said, "Sorry!" and the other woman turned to her and said, "Oh, excuse me!"

I remembered this story while reading an article by Xiaowen Guan, Hee Sun Park, and Hye Eun Lee, called "Cross-cultural difference in apology" in the January 2009 edition of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, or IJIR. Like Cousin Sue's friend, these three researchers asked people in the USA, China, and Korea to think about the situation of stepping on someone's foot in a train or bus, and their expectations about apologies. Though it can be amusing to read a very academic analysis of an everyday behavior, it is interesting to think about why we apologize and the role culture plays in this. After categorizing apologies according to the intent, desire, obligation and norms of the one apologizing, Guan and colleagues put forth some hypotheses about how culture influences apologies, and learned from their research that they were wrong!

The researchers had supposed that apologies would be more common in collectivist societies than in individualistic ones, but in fact, the Americans in the study showed a greater tendency to apologize than either the Chinese or Korean study participants. Though someone might accidentally step on another person's foot on the train or bus in any of these cultures, the variations in response don't seem to relate to how individualistic or collectivist are the people involved.

Of the three possible other explanations they provide:

(1) that Americans don't ride public transportation much so don't step on others' feet so often;

(2) that the American sense of personal space makes such an accident more offensive to the other person; or

(3) that the lower context US culture demands more of a spoken apology;

I vote for number 2. Living in New York and riding the subway daily, it certainly feels to be the norm that both the person stepping on the foot and the person stepped on will immediately apologize: the one for stepping on the foot and the other for being in the wrong place when the other person was stepping. Sometimes when this doesn't happen, you can hear a loud request for an apology, using indirect communication (a cry of pain, for instance) or direct communication ("Watch where you're going! You stepped on my foot. You could at least apologize.")

Ritual apologies
In this New York, and probably USA context, there is an enforced norm to apologize quickly for any accidental invasion of personal space. "Excuse me" or "Sorry" may now be equivalent, but whenever I realize that I have really injured someone in such an accident, I feel obliged to say more. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you OK?" I need to show more sincerity and not just ritually take the blame and move on.

Several months ago I wrote about genres of communication having different cultural norms. The apology is one such genre that can look very different across cultures. For instance a German AFS student in Hong Kong noted, "Here it's acceptable to belch out loud, but if you sneeze, you must apologize. Back home just the opposite is true."

When we cross cultures, we may feel strongly the obligation to apologize (or not to apologize!) in particular situations, and even if we speak the language perfectly, we may still want to express our own cultural selves by showing respect in the way we most expect. In Claire Kramsch's excellent book, Context and Culture in Language Teaching, she gives an example of an American student in Germany who is asked by her host father to close the door after she entered the room. She wants to say, "Oh, I'm sorry" as she does this, but no apology is expected by her host father. She considers several options for a German term and chooses "Entschuldigung" because it just felt disrespectful and impolite to say nothing.

I thought of this recently when reading a message from a Japanese speaker who was completely fluent in English, but chose to use a more Japanese style, apologizing for being the one to take the post of a beloved colleague who was retiring. I believe he understood well that an American speaker would never think to apologize for replacing someone who was retiring, but it must have felt disrespectful and simply wrong not to communicate in this Japanese way. It was a strong message, coming from one cultural context to many others, asking for good will and cooperation, honoring a colleague, and communicating respect.

If we are to communicate meaningfully across cultures, we will necessarily be communicating from the perspective of our own culture, and that will often include using some of our own cultural modes of communication, translated and/or explained.

In my own inadequate way I hope to do this as well.

Bettina Hansel

Geography sometimes suffers from image problems in the USA. When I tell people that I have a doctorate in geography, they assume I must know the names of every national, state, or provincial capitol in the world. Or that I can name the 10 longest rivers, the 20 highest peaks. Several years ago I was called for jury duty -- that institution of the US court system that places ordinary citizens as members of a jury to determine the outcome of a trial or civil case. As part of the voir dire process of jury selection, when my turn came I was publicly asked about my education level by the judge. I responded that I held a doctorate. "In what field?" the judge wanted to know. When I answered, "geography," the entire court room burst out laughing. Geography, it seems, was seen as knowledge for trivia contests, and not as a serious academic field.

But yesterday in the New York Times, the field made headlines on the first page of the "Arts" section: under the headline, "Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool is That?" In their social science way, Elisabeth Currid and Sarah Williams are looking at the spatial distribution of cultural phenomena. Their data: thousands of professional photographs of "flashy parties and smaller affairs on both coasts" for sale by Getty Images. Because these stock images are commercially available (and a bit expensive), they have been given a certain market value and significance. Getty Images photographers seek out events that they believe will allow them to sell their images, and the presences of photographers also draws a certain crowd. In short, Currid and Williams take this as the "cultural buzz" -- what people in the USA are talking about.

And they mapped it with an attractive mapping program, showing the color-coded epicenters of art, music, theater, and television events.

I have been trying to decide if this is in the "Arts" sections because the maps are visually attractive, or because they are maps about events relating to the arts. But for me, the importance is the map itself, and the association that it makes between culture and place. For even if this is only about the "buzz" of celebrity, it speaks of the patterns left on the ground: the "where" questions we ask about anything that happens or simply exists. Where is it?

Earlier this year I talked with an AFS student heading to a host family in the Bronx. There is an entirely different "buzz" around the Bronx than shown by the "Arts" maps of Currid and Williams. A quick search of photos posted for the Bronx on Google Maps revealed that numerous people have pegged their 25-year-old photographs of abandoned buildings and urban graffitti to various locations in the Bronx. The images are powerful and potentially frightening. Getty Images, on the other hand, now shows image of the Yankee Baseball Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, the Bronx Botanic Gardens, a few interesting and stylized portraits of young African-American men, and some occasional images of grafitti. This, I guess, is what sells now. Some places become landmarks, others go unnoticed. Still others are hopelessly stereotyped. Neither the photos mapped on Google or the Getty search of Bronx photos give a true impression of the Bronx. You need to know what else is going on, and how to interpret it.

Google Maps are useful if you start to save them to "my maps" and mark them up. Map the bars, the dry cleaners, the churches, the schools, the shoe stores, the courts, the banks, the grocery stores, the auto repair shops. Find the shared maps where people have located crimes or auto accidents, or their favorite restaurants. Nothing is evenly spread across the landscape. A map helps you see what's plentiful and what's scarce in a place, and this tells you a lot about power and about culture. With the technology today, we can map at the level of the street address rather than country, state, province or nation. We can see the amazing variations and understand how complex is the fabric of culture. But we still need a few local informants to help us interpret what we are finding.

Where you are and where you go is important, and quite often you need to go someplace else to change your perspective. Most people would be able to learn a great deal about other cultures simply by taking more of an interest in the diversity that exists within their own city or town, but the familiarity of the place where we live may keep us from crossing the borders that are set up within it. Instead we stick to the paths we always use, and encounter the people we usually encounter along those paths: even in a big city like New York. 

In the coming months I would like to do more with cultural mapping -- not the buzz, perhaps, but maybe more the variation in the mundane in the places I live and visit. I also am planning a move of this blog to a new host: one that makes it easier to comment and will allow me to add pages. It will still be found at www.interculturaleyes.org but with a new look.

Ever since I ran across this July 2007 article by British journalist Charles Bremner on French attitudes toward their president's running habit I've wondered about how people characterize and stereotype political culture. Attitudes and assumptions about exercise are also part of the cultures we create together, and so they vary widely. I shared the Bremner article with a group of AFS staff last year who were participating in a training seminar on intercultural learning. Sure enough, our French participant did agree that probably it would be typical for the French to view Sarkosy's running habit as being anti-intellectual. She noted that she did not work out or go to the gym, and that it wouldn't be very "French" to do so. She associated running in the park with rich businessmen who want to be like Americans. (All this was before the big economic meltdown in the USA.)

I had never thought of exercise as particularly right wing or left wing. Then today on the radio, I heard this story (link below) about US Republican Congressman Dave Drier who is essentially trying to "force" the members of congress to engage in some type of morning exercise program as an example to the American public of preventive health care and efforts to combat obesity. A podcast and video are available. So maybe exercise is conservative in the USA also and I didn't know it.

I polled the AFS staff taking the seminar about the attitudes they found in their own cultures regarding exercise. Some of the responses:

• I'm from Latin America and in general, can tell that we pay a lot of attention to how we look. It is very common to go to the gym and jog and usually to be on some kind of diet.
• Jogging is fashionable for higher society people, done in parks, preferably in expensive clothes, with a partner or mp3. (Czech Republic)
• People are too busy. Those who regularly exercise are the retired people. (Hong Kong)

Each morning as my husband and I walk to the subway we pass a small group of older Chinese women and one man doing exercises in a small park and playground next to the road. It's a particularly Chinese form of exercising, always outdoors regardless of the temperature. Exercises include swinging their arms and clapping their hands, as described by the All China Women's federation on their website. It looks like fun. But is this the exercise of "retired people" for the Chinese? Is it old-fashioned or modern, among Chinese in the USA? Do Chinese immigrants of every education level do these exercises?

Exercise may also be connected to spirituality. Many years ago I had a friend who, as a cancer survivor, joined some special Qi Gong classes. She loved them because they were gentle and fun, and she did feel better, but she was at the same time quite skeptical of some of the spiritual messages that came with the program. Trained in Western scientific thought in an atheist tradition, she couldn't make sense of the program intellectually, and could not explain at all why she was feeling better as a result of the classes. In short, she lacked the cultural context for the exercises she was doing, and was acting like many sojourners who find themselves in an inexplicable environment. She tried not to judge it as "mumbo jumbo" and gamely went along with whatever was happening without really trying to understand it.

It's not possible to explore every fascinating aspect of cultural differences, but by studying and reflecting on cultural differences like the differences in attitudes toward exercise, I find I learn more and more about my own culture and about myself. It's a journey I will continue.

Bettina Hansel

Age and Experience

I'm often asked, "What is the best age to study abroad?" AFS students are typically 16-18. CISV (Children's International Summer Villages) organizes programs for 11-year-olds. University-level study abroad is rapidly growing. Interesting opportunities exist for older adults to study or research abroad as well. I see no reason NOT to take advantage of as many of these opportunities as you can!

How do you view human development? Do prejudices become more firmly fixed as we age? Are some ages riper for learning than others? Certainly one of the arguments for sending younger students is the idea that they are somehow not yet formed and there is still a chance to leave an imprint. Yet the longer I live the more I realize I am still learning, and now I am learning things I was much less open to when I was younger. I'm also less easily impressed or shocked.

A First Experience

Many years ago I took my then 7-year-old daughter on a road trip of French-speaking Canada. One episode stands out in my mind: we were walking along a trail in a park and encountered a French-speaking family with a similar-aged daughter. The two girls started speaking to each other excitedly, and then both of them suddenly stopped and stared at each other. For both of them it was the first time they had tried to talk to someone their own age who spoke another language, and they were unsure how to manage this. They moved to grunts, noises, and gestures but managed to discover that they both were interested in the music of Michael Jackson, who had then recently released the "Thriller" album. We, the adults, walked alongside, speaking a mixture of French and English while our girls seemed to move to their own language over the next hour or so as we hiked together.

Early experiences like this one often lead a young person in interesting directions later on. In the 15-country AFS "Long Term Impact Study" (available at http://www.afs.org/research) we found that AFS students were more likely to have parents who encouraged them to meet people from other cultures, who took them traveling to other places when they were younger, and who encouraged them to study abroad. These students were also more likely to study abroad at the university level, to seek jobs that involved working with people from other cultures, and to live abroad for a year or more while working or while following a spouse with an overseas job assignment. A social network community for such ex-patriots, InterNations, is an official supporter of AFS because of the numerous AFS returnees in its network.

These multiple intercultural experiences lead to greater intercultural sensitivity, lower anxiety around other cultures, and friendship networks that are culturally diverse. There are some differences in the kind of outcomes related to a high school program and a university program, as they Long Term Impact Study has shown, but the real pattern that emerges is the lifelong interest in other cultures.

Access to Opportunities 

This week I attended a special awards luncheon at the Asia Society, honoring the winners of the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for International Excellence in International Education. It was a wonderful event highlighting many excellent programs and initiatives that try to bring an international perspective into the classroom and educational systems in the United States. I was particularly impressed with the Pulitzer Center's Global Gateway that links journalists with classrooms, and the efforts of individual schools like Independence Charter School in Philadelphia.

As I think of our mission to create a more just and peaceful world, I recognize that a big part of this is to ensure that the skills and insights that a student gains abroad will be applied when they get home to enable them to deal in a positive way with the diversity, stereotypes, and prejudices they find on their home turf. I'm sure this is true of many of the international exchange programs offered at various ages.

But from what I heard from Lynette Clemetson, Managing Editor of The Root, a Washington Post web publication, international education may often have its own blinders on. When she went to the University of Pittsburgh as an English major, Ms. Clemetson never heard about study abroad from her academic advisors. As an African American, she supposes that she probably did not look like the kind of student who would want to study abroad student, at least to her academic advisors. Only by accident did she learn of Semester at Sea, a program that was then sponsored by her own university. One of her friends, a woman who had been encouraged to go abroad, was applying for a scholarship for this program. So Ms. Clemetson decided to apply for one as well, received it, and saw China for the first time. This led her to graduate school at University of Pittsburgh, when she finally was able to begin studying Mandarin as part of her East Asian studies, with intense immersion experiences in Taiwan that helped her become fluent.

While Ms. Clemetson's story is one of a nearly missed opportunity, it's also a message that it's never too late for someone who is curious about other cultures and motivated to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Colors and Cultures

I'm just back from a short vacation in a small cabin in El Yunque tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico and I'm filled with memories of wet green leaves, clouds, emerald-colored humming birds and very tiny, very loud, coquí frogs. Though we had really just a few days to enjoy ourselves, my strongest impressions are those of deep vivid colors and the white clouds that obscured the mountain top, and the contrast of sound and silence that we found as we listed to the birds and frogs, the leaves in the wind, the car horns coming up the road, and then the sound that is silence.

Back in New York yesterday, I missed the green, and I missed the silence, but today I wear the customary green for St. Patrick's Day. My email left untended for a few days brought the announcement of the winning videos in the US Government-sponsored "ExchangesConnect" video contest. I especially enjoyed this winning video from José Vinícius Reis Gouveia, a 16-year old Brazilian high school student from Recife, a city close to my heart because of dear friends who live there.

This next prize-winning video, from 23-year old Bijoy Thangaraj of Bangalore featuring his own original music, was simply pure fun.

José, Bijoy, and two others have won a two-week exchange experience. Perhaps, as I did after my short time in Puerto Rico, they will return home with mostly sensory impressions: colors, tastes, smells, sounds. This is how they express themselves now in these videos. But even a short experience may be enough to raise their curiosity to the next level, to make them attached to the place and to people they meet, to make them want to return and to want to welcome people from elsewhere into their homes.

And it's inspiring to see all these beautifully crafted videos from people as young as 14 years old.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Reset Button

A recent news article in the New York Times caught my attention. It described the cultural miscommunication occasioned by Hillary Clinton's gift to Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov: A red "reset button" as a symbol of the intentions of the USA's new government to start fresh in building its relationship with Russia. If you watch the video below, you might suppose that the miscommunication is just a matter of a somewhat unfortunate typo, easy to overlook and forget.

But of course there is more to read between the lines than the smiles on the faces. In the U.S. we often say of a gift "It's the thought that counts." And I certainly believe that the "thought" was well intentioned. Hillary Clinton sought a way to symbolize a new beginning, to connect to a remark by the U.S. Vice President Biden, a way to use laughter to break tension.

Humor doesn't always translate well, as I pointed out in a blog post from January 2008, even had the correct Russian word been used on the button (which, it should be noted, was printed in the English or Roman alphabet instead of the Russian alphabet). That is why it struck me as a risky gesture for important high-level diplomacy. But part of diplomacy is also being able to recover from a few cross-cultural faux pas and to look beyond the style to read and communicate the intent.

The reset button is of course a metaphor, stemming from the reset of electric circuit breakers when there has been an overload or a short in the system. Video games and other electronic devices also have a reset feature that lets you essentially start over after you've made a terrible mess of whatever it was you were doing. So I would imagine that in giving the reset button, Hillary Clinton was thinking about wanting to undo a terrible mess in the relationship between the USA and Russia and start over from some default point.* But I'm not sure that everyone would think it a good idea to have it so clearly pointed out that our relationship has problems, especially on video tape in front of dozens of clicking cameras to catch every moment.

But back to the gift of a large red button, however labeled. As someone who grew up in a Cold War environment in the USA, a big red button in the context of the USA and Russia evokes images of the button that would be pushed to start a nuclear war. As the two of them pushed the button together, wouldn't this context also go through their minds? The message of the reset button starts to become confusing.

On top of that, is a joke an appropriate way to begin a new relationship? In the USA we often do use humor to remove tension, which is why it is so common for public speakers to begin their speeches with a joke. Jokes are used in board rooms and churches, and humor may even find its way into a funeral; but on the other hand, very few people in the USA would think to begin an interview with a perspective employer with a joke. Weddings also seem to be serious matters, and while there may be jokes at weddings, they may not always be well received.

What about joke gifts? In how many cultures is it common to give humorous gifts? Certainly this happens in the USA, and there are lots of humorous birthday cards and "gag" gifts that tease people about getting older. My husband gave me a joke hat on my 50th birthday, for instance, but he also gave me a couple of very nice, serious gifts. Otherwise I would not have been happy. It's not that I expected anything lavish or expensive from him: just something thoughtful, something that showed that he cares. Joke gifts are also given among friends in New Zealand, according to my sources. But in Russia? It wouldn't be common, my colleagues tell me. Nor in France, where a colleague tells me that a plastic throw-away toy like this would be quickly dismissed. "It's not really a relationship-building item."

One has the sense that Clinton and Lavrov made the best of an awkward situation, and the world is not going to fall apart because of it. And perhaps that's what intercultural learning is about. Like any bridge, the bridges we build across cultures require constant repair.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

______________________________________

*I suppose it's somewhat natural that this button analogy has moved on to the economy, where we are dismayed to learn: There is no reset button.

Vetted and Launched

Last week I joined Gary Rhodes in a workshop at the CSIET Schools Conference in Hartford. It was our change to vet our soon to be launched online intercultural learning programs. Gary's site is part of a larger project of the Center for Global Education of the University of Southern California. AFS's online program is part of the resources we create for our own participants.

Even with 2 1/2 hours, the program seemed a little rushed as we wanted to understand our audience and create time for interaction, give them a taste of our two different sites, have some discussion and create time for feedback.

It was really the first time I tried to lead people through our site, now officially launched in its pilot test mode. Since we couldn't depend on having "live" access to the internet at the workshop, Gary and I both decided to paste selected pages on Powerpoint. This was a serious challenge. Our site has several components working together, and right now, forums and blogs for exchange students from 2 countries. They have a "passport" of text, exercises, surveys, photos,
videos, links to other websites, and open-ended questions to answer. Some questions are for their private reflection, and for these they work in a portfolio -- a kind of electronic scrap book. Others are linked to discussion threads in a forum. Still others suggest that they create a blog entry.

I was grateful for the input we got on one section in particular: the one on stereotypes and generalizations. At AFS we have been using a variety of activities to talk about stereotypes and generalizations since... well, forever, but certainly even long before I arrive there in 1980. So we took an old chestnut of an orientation activity -- the one that makes you recognize the stereotypes and prejudices you have when you select someone as a renter for the apartment you have in your own house -- and put it into a web format. Typically some very specific groups of people are mentioned, with characteristics that could be seen as problematic. The benefit of the activity typically would come from the dilemma of choosing and, of course, the debriefing. Typically in all these old training manuals, the debriefing instructions are fairly minimal: maybe just a few discussion questions.

Put in the web activity as a survey that could be compared with peers, coupled with appropriate text, was clearly inadequate to the task, I realized, as the workshop participants discussed the online activity. So on Monday we reworked the activity, choosing very minimal descriptions of the potential renters and letting the students fill in
the blanks with their own stereotypes based on age, sex, and family situation. We also repositioned the survey exercise within the topic so that it was more explicitly framed to be an activity to raise awareness of one's own stereotypes. It definitely seems to us to be a better activity.

 

And soon we will find out. The first students in the pilot test logged onto the site today. Within a couple of hours we already had two who set up their blogs and one who joined the Malaysia forum and posted a new thread, and a recent AFS exchange student working with us on the design who posted a comment on one of our discussion questions -- and who also posted the first "abusive post" report as a joke because we had deleted something he had put in a test version.

We also discovered that there is a bug with posting to the USA forum. I'm sure this won't be the last one we'll discover. But it has been an exciting day, and I can't wait to see what else goes up. I'm sure I'm about to learn as much from this as they do.

I also can't help feeling as if I have stepped into a new and somewhat chaotic world. Although we based our work on very specific learning goals and theory, and a careful outline, the creative process involved dozens of people's input to the ideas, photos, videos and writing plus dozens of unexpected features and constraints of the DotNetNuke platform we are using. But now the current and soon-to-be exchange students are adding to the mix, creating their own content. Right now what seems to interest our first two bloggers is the social politics of their host communities. They DO seem to be having fun with it. We'll find out later how well it helps them learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Always and Never

As I was growing up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, it was my mother who was my main guide to the world and how it works. My father taught me useful skills, such as how to saw and how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, and even an alternate way to tie my shoes, but when it came to questions about social behavior he was largely quiet and my mother dominated.

The messages usually included the word "always" or "never" as in:

"Never comb your hair at the table."

"Always cover your mouth when you yawn."

"Never walk around barefoot."

"Always write a thank-you note when you receive a gift."

These messages were reinforced with strong words about anyone who happened to ignore these rules.

"It was a filthy coffee shop. At the booth next to us there was a woman who kept combing her hair."

"She's old enough, she should know better."

"They're nice kids, but I don't know why their mother lets them run around without their shoes. They'll grow up with huge calluses on the soles of their feet."

"Your aunt called. She wondered if you got home safely after your visit to her. She never heard anything from you."

Oops. That last one was directed to me. I had to write a very long and apologetic thank you after that. It was a variation on the rule I hadn't recognized. You also must always write to thank someone for their hospitality when you travel to visit them. This one stung sharply because I was already "old enough to know better."

When a teenager travels on AFS as an exchange student they are also "old enough" to have internalized most of these rules. They know more or less instinctively how to behave in terms of their own culture's expectations, though even in their own culture's terms they may slip up a bit now and then. The astonishing thing that happens on the exchange program is that suddenly they have a different set of cultural expectations to meet. But since they are no longer little children, and probably don't speak the language that well, they often don't hear the "always" and "never" rules from their host family.

And how will the family politely tell the exchange student if he or she has slipped up and broken one of these rules? It can be a delicate matter.

"Vera," an exchange student from Germany, realized that there was some issue with the family rules about her plans to visit friends she had met who lived in what would be seen as a poorer, rougher part of town - a favela in Brazil. But the family didn't directly tell her not to go, and Vera's reaction was this:

...Meanwhile, I give in only rarely, for if they cannot tell me a clear “no,” then they must accept that I don’t hear a “no.”

On the other hand, for a US student in Ecuador who took a 1/2 hour long shower one day, the direct approach used by his host family was just a little embarrassing, though apparently necessary.

My family sat down with me and slowly explained why I can’t take long showers and that everything was ok but they needed me to follow this rule. My Spanish wasn’t too good then but they took their time and explained so I understood.... I felt a little foolish for not understanding them the first time they explained the rules.

As a German girl in Hong Kong discovered, home and host culture rules are sometimes exactly the opposite:

Their eating habits are quite different. For example, it is permissible to belch out loud, but if you have to sneeze, you must apologize. In my country it is just the opposite.

Here is a small clip from a video created by AFS Germany showing how some opposite expectations about table manners may play out. We used this in the online learning program we created for the AFS students, which is being piloted tested by AFS-USA and AFS Malaysia in the coming months.

The credits for the video clip go to the volunteers involved: Pongrachot Meesaiyat, Helmut Hein, Monika Vogel (the main actors) and Conni Emmert, the camerawoman and producer.

AFS has other materials to help host families and their exchange students discover where their rules may be different. One package we have available on the web in English and Spanish is designed to be used just before and in the weeks right after the students arrive in their host countries.

Share Your Own Rules
Lately in the blogsphere I find frequent invitations asking anyone and everyone to post their own variations of some sort of list. I usually resist -- I don't have that much time on my hands -- but I would be interested in hearing from people in a variety of cultures about the rules you were taught as a child and how you were taught them, and how you came to realize that these rules didn't actually apply in other cultures. It doesn't have to take the form of "7 Rules My Mother (or My Father) Taught Me" but that would be fine. A grandparent or a teacher might also have been the main source of your understanding of your culture's expectations for your behavior.

Consider yourself tagged. If you want to make such a list and share it, you can respond to the blog here, or you can email me at betsy.hansel@afs.org.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Online Cultures

I have recently been heavily involved in setting up an online intercultural learning program for our participants. One of the last pieces to put in place was a document of guidelines for blog and forum posts on the site. This is a typical statement of general rules about what can and cannot be posted, and states that the moderators have the right to pull off posts that we think are offensive or inappropriate. It is an explicit statement of how we expect people to behave in this online culture.

Like all sites, there are also some structural constraints to what people can and cannot do on the site, and these are difficult to change. We completed this pilot project with a very limited budget, but with the rapid evolution of the Internet, it makes no sense to spend years developing projects, and many very good Internet tools are practically free. Most important is to be able to complete the work in a matter of months or else the technology you were working with will be obsolete before you're through.

So even before the first students start to work with this site, we are already thinking of what needs to improve. This week, if all goes well, the first few students will start using it and I hope they will provide some feedback soon. The first students on line will be from the USA. The second group will be from Malaysia, starting shortly afterwards. This is the pilot test. We hope that the students will continue working with the program, the forum and blogs throughout their experience, from before they leave home, while they are abroad, and through the months after they return home. Our decisions about what to include are based on input from

Here are the icons we use throughout the program:

Even the icons are likely to receive different reactions from different cultures, let alone the structure behind them in which the participant is guided by an online "passport," and from there is led to specific questions to discuss in a forum, to a place to think things through privately in words and images in a portfolio, and to a place for reasonably open self-expression in a blog that can be shared with the community of students participating in the exchange programs.

The idea is that eventually the text portions would be translated and adapted by the various countries, but that the blogs and forums would be common spaces, and all students would have common themes that they work with. We intend and hope that they will learn from each other guided by our content. There are, of course a few technical issues that still need to be ironed out, but in theory they will work. I am more worried about getting the participants interacting than about working through the technical constraints to allow this to happen.

Over the past year or so, I have been talking to Jon Rubin of the COIL center at SUNY Purchase about the cultural variations and cross-cultural misunderstandings that are specific to online communication. The COIL center's mission is to promote and improve collaborative learning projects and courses, using technology to connect campuses in different countries. The interests overlap considerably with AFS, in particular with our soon-to-launch online intercultural learning project.

Recently I read some articles about cultural differences relevant to the challenge of creating a multinational educational web site.

1. Pfeil, Zaphiris and Ang, "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia" comes with the warning that different cultures structure information differently, which is in fact one of the points we make in the on line program. While we anticipated translation and adaptation by each sending country. It will be even possible for countries to change the order of pages to some extent if needed, but probably a full reorganization for each country is not going to work.
2. A. Xie, et al., (in press) Cross-cultural influence on communication effectiveness and user reminded me that people from cultures that normally use very rich, high-context communication may have trouble with a web site that is mostly text (like this blog). So our new online learning program has a lot of text but also videos, and plenty of images and graphics. But we may still be too text dependent. And yet: entire novels in Japan, some wildly popular, have been written via cell phone text message. The content is more important than the medium. But maybe a video will help. Here's one of the clips we put in the site that came from a larger work "Snapshots: When Cultures Interact" that was produced by our European umbrella organization, EFIL, the European Federation for Intercultural Learning (made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/)
    
 
3. Richardson and Smith, (2007) The influence of high/low-context culture and power distance on choice of communication media found that Japanese and US students do choose different media for communicating with teachers, but also highlighted the difficulty of measuring these things. For example, they supposed that students might choose the most effective or preferred means of communication, but this was not borne out in their data. Instead they suggest that cultures also attach symbolic value to the act of sending email, telephoning, or meeting face-to-face, and people may choose based on the symbolic meaning. Written text may have more authority than a phone call in one culture, while an email message may be seen having a less serious purpose. Face-to-face meetings may seem like the most important communication, but people in many cultures have been known to interrupt the conversation with the person they are with to answer the phone.

With these differences, it is hard not to imagine that forum postings and blogging styles will also vary by culture, with some cultures more likely to jump in with encouraging responses for others, and others more likely to look for a humorous or ironic comment.

In launching our self-directed online educational program, I have several worries:

1. Will the text sections appear too SERIOUS?
2. Will the forum or blog appear intimidating?
3. Will the images seem too cliched or sentimental?
4. Will the students be motivated to push the "CONTINUE" buttons?
5. Will the learning they take away come close to what we intend? 

I eagerly and nervously await the first exchange students.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Power Distance

I don't talk very often about the cultural value dimensions of Geert Hofstede, mostly because the research that originally led to the discovery of these factors is fairly old now, and the specific numeric values attributed to each national culture are specific to that time period. For example, in terms of the "Uncertainty Avoidance" dimension: I am certain that the numerous law suits and new regulations in the USA over the last several decades has made the US as a society much less willing to assume risk, though of course we see what happened when the banking industry was able to bundle a lot of different risks into financial investment packages. There are different realms to risk taking. A professional gambler may always wear a seat belt when traveling by car.

In short, one number on a scale never gives a full sense of how to characterize a society's values, though it can be useful for comparison. Here is a brief clip of Geert Hofstede from a video produced by EFIL, the European Federation of Intercultural Learning, which is an umbrella organization of AFS partners in Europe, and made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/

Lately I've been thinking about Power Distance, the Hofstede dimension that deals with the extent to which a society accepts inequality. I recently watched a television show dramatizing the life of John Adams who represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress of the 13 colonies in America that in 1776 declared their independence from Britain. Watching the supposed drafting of this Declaration of Independence, we see an imagined Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson discussing the final wording: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..." Of course, women were not self-evidently equal, nor were the slaves. Both these points were touched on by characters in the show, of course, since it is a 21st Century USA production. But I came away with the sense that this equality is still not self-evident.

But equality nevertheless is part of the US belief system, though perhaps less so than, say, in Denmark or Austria or New Zealand, according to the data from Hofstede. Exchange students from the USA or countries who similarly have a strong belief that all people are supposed to be equal sometimes find themselves in a country where the Power Distance dimension is higher -- where inequality is accepted as a fact of life, and some people are expected to hold more power than others. Some are expected to lead and make decisions, and some are expected to serve. It's not that anyone particularly judges this to be a "good" thing, but in a place like India, for example, what's self-evident is that all people are NOT equal in basic ways like wealth, education, and status.

In the USA, to the extent we believe that all people are in fact equal, we may then blame those who seem less capable for not taking full advantage of their possibilities because we also believe very strongly in individualism -- that each person is in charge of his or her own destiny in many important ways. For those who see the inequality that exists in fact in terms of opportunity, in terms of access to education and resources, all of this blame is terribly unfair.

Of course, while there are obvious differences in power that can be found within even the low power distance cultures, but the power differences between countries and between ethnic groups must also be taken into account in understanding the context of the relationships you may be trying to build across cultures. Trust and respect are the essential tools for cross cultural communication because there usually is some element of power difference if not a competition for power. It's not enough to just know the other culture and its norms to build a relationship. 

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS Intercultural Programs

Open-minded

1. going to noisy, crowded parties
2. playing football (U.S version)
3. playing chess
4. reading comic books
5. jogging
6. shopping for clothes
7. repairing cars

Heroes and Villains

I noticed yesterday that two of my New York City Facebook friends have become "Fans" of Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the airline pilot who successfully landed his disabled jet on the Hudson River, allowing all 155 passengers to survive.

Though I'm not sure what the point is of joining the fan club, it's hard not to be caught up in the media splash surrounding this pilot's excellent handling of a crisis situation. The story is a compelling one, of course, and the pilot's behavior and skill are everything one would hope for in a person with such responsibility. I always hope the pilot of my plane is this capable and responsible. Flying several times every year and always arriving safely at my various destinations can also seem like a miracle, and I want to thank all these pilots who didn't have to make a crash landing while I was on board. Many factors, including timing and location as well as the skill of the pilot, contributed to the successful outcome of a bad situation.

It was about a dozen years ago that I first went to Turkey, attending the World Congress of AFS. Faced with a heavy number of meetings and responsibilities during the Congress itself, I had little hope of seeing much of Istanbul. Somewhat wistfully I watched the slide presentation by our hosts in Turkey, intended to highlight the wonderful cultural sites and the natural beauty of their country, which I had little hope of seeing beyond the walls of our hotel. And then a slide depicting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, came up on the screen and the dozens of young Turkish volunteers, guests, and staff spontaneously and enthusiastically applauded their hero. I was startled to see this tribute to a man already dead some 60 years. Washington? Lincoln? Kennedy? Would any past president in the USA elicit such a genuinely felt applause? Wouldn't the founder of Turkey by now be just a figure in history? Wouldn't his image be seen so often that such a reaction would be difficult to sustain?

I pondered this question of national heroes for a long time. In my high school and university years in the USA, there was a sense that we were constantly bringing down villains, but that we had no heroes. Was it not the time for heroes? Or was it simply that no heroes emerged? Or did the media at that time tend to foster cynics instead of heroes? This was a classroom discussion I remember from that time. We thought of heroes and villains as mostly stereotyped characters from the comics or from traditional melodramas and Westerns. In the 60s and 70s, movies that wanted to be taken seriously did not have heroes; nor traditional happy endings. Heroes and villains only re-emerged with the Star Wars films.

I don’t know how cynical we were in fact, but I do know that I am becoming less cynical in recent years. Perhaps my culture is moving away from cynicism as a cultural outlook, and more to a place where it makes perfect sense to create a hero's fan page on Facebook for a skilled airline pilot who had the misfortune to hit a flock of geese (it seems), the good fortune to have the Hudson River handy when this happened, and to have the skill and training to keep everyone safe in a frightening situation.

Is hope the opposite of cynicism? Maybe it's possible to have both together. This is probably nowhere more visible than when youthful idealism meets intellectual cynicism. From the perspective of New York City, the USA seems ready to embrace hope and heroism, and this is found not just in the excitement of Captain Sullenberger's achievement but also, particularly in neighborhoods like mine, with the inauguration of Barack Obama on the day after the celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King. Huge Obama posters that still hang in the stores down the street, along with images and references to Dr. King, whose birthday we celebrate today, although technically it was last week. And perhaps now I can imagine a group of young people from the USA who would spontaneously applaud an image of Martin Luther King, now more than 40 years after his death, or the soon to be president, Barack Obama.

There is always a rich and dynamic cultural story surrounding the heroes of a culture, whether their status lasts a few weeks or for more than 60 years; whether their ascent to heroism came about by chance or through long years of planning and organization. The story of a hero is one that connects in some profound way to a particular culture and its shared values, assumptions and beliefs. The story itself may evolve as the hero’s reputation lives. As in the case of mythic heroes, it isn’t even necessary that the story be objectively or factually true, but it must be emotionally true in a very real way to the culture that creates and honors the hero. I’m hopeful enough to want this story to last.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International

Sometimes the most relevant information to guide our understanding of the world is found not in the main news sections of a newspaper or news program, but in what is often considered the "softer" area of the "Home" section. Following up on the last issue concerning on the cultural context that has led to the fact that I live far away from my 92-year-old mother, and how I attempt to care for her across this distance, I wanted to point out that an entirely different trend is being found in the USA, among slightly younger families than mine. 

Living Together:  Your Mother Is Moving In? That's Great! in today's New York Times is a report on an apparent trend in the US for grandmothers to live with their daughter's families and to help with the care of their grandchildren while the the parents are at work.

I think this article helps highlight some of the factors that contribute to cultural change, and the interplay of economic and demographic factors in creating these cultural changes. This is just another opportunity to emphasize the dynamic nature of cultures. We cannot learn even our own culture just once: it's a lifetime of new experiences with other people in a group we belong to. Learning about other cultures (of groups we don't actually belong to) is also a lifetime journey through both time and place.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Independent Living

It is so common to minimize cultural differences by focusing on the various things that culture have in common. Sometimes this takes the form of saying something like, “people everywhere care about their families.” You could also say that in every culture there are people who are alienated from their families and have a true statement. But even in the caring about their families, there are important cultural differences in the values we attach to how we care for our families.

Back in my graduate school days, I made an interesting discovery about the communication patterns among geographically dispersed and mobile extended families in the U.S.A. – by studying my own! Possibly Master's students in U.S. universities are still allowed to do case studies of their own families as part of their thesis work, but even then I realized the gift I was given. I wrote my master's thesis on the specific American cultural patterns of my own extended family.

At that time, there was a general emphasis on the nuclear family (again, why nuclear?) and the assumption was common that family ties were less important for the individualistic U.S. culture than for other cultures (in Europe, for example) where people tended to stay in the same towns and cities to be close to their relatives. These are stereotypes of course, and as with any stereotype there is often some basis for the statements made, but always serious oversimplifications.

What I had noticed about my own family was the enormous effort made by certain individual members to hold together and manage the dispersed network. The extended family also seemed to have more importance at certain stages in life, and I was entering just one of those stages as I tried to write my thesis while my little daughter napped. Fortunately, just by chance, I had a cousin who had moved to the same city at about the same time - a cousin who was one of those family network managers, and who brought a different perspective on my parents and grandparents.

I spent the last week with my mother, along with my brothers, my niece and my husband. We were helping her move to a smaller apartment as a necessary economy. She lives in a city we have never lived in, and there is no family there, so we rented a house while we prepared the new apartment and sorted through the photos from so many decades of family. In anticipation of her failing memory, my mother had written the name of those pictured on the back (or sometimes the front) of most of the family photos. We told many stories to my niece, who is a family network manager in training, eager to pass on the family history to her children and her brothers.

Outside of the U.S. cultural context, it may seem strange that we don't bring my mother to New York where I live, or have her move
closer to my brothers. After all, what is it that ties her to that small suburb in Florida where she lives now? Certainly we have considered doing this. But she made the decision to move to this retirement facility almost 12 years ago because she wanted to select the place herself where she would live out the rest of her years. At that time she described to us how, when needed, she could move from the "independent living" section to the "assisted living" (where she is now), and if needed to the "continuing care" section. She has already pre-paid the arrangements for her eventual funeral, there in this city where none of us lives. Like so many Americans of her generation in the U.S.A., she always valued her independence and she never wanted "to be a burden to you three children."

We see that she is happy there. We have developed personal relationships with the staff there who care for her in a way I'd never
know how to match. I have met with her various doctors and been impressed with the amount of time they give her, and the respect they show her. I realize sadly that this would not be easy to duplicate in New York. So we travel to her because this is where she decided to live, she is established there, and it is a good place. At the same time it never feels quite right to me to let her live so far away from us, though perhaps it is we who need to move to her rather than the other way around. So we balance our independent living, our right to chose where to live, with hers. For now, this is how it is.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Giving meaning to place
A few days ago I read about the Tokyo Tower in the New York Times as the Japanese celebrated its 50th anniversary. It is still "world’s tallest self-supported steel structure" but that's not what gives the tower its meaning. As a post World War II monument, the tower’s
symbolic growth and decline are contained within the lifetime of many Japanese citizens, so it's easy for the Times article to tap the memories of a few people and show how it is that a culture gives meaning and significance to a place.

Like the Eiffel tower that it resembles, the Tokyo Tower was quickly made into a symbol of progress and the technological ambitions of the nation. What's interesting about the article, though, is that it documents a change in the symbolism for Japan. Now, it seems that the 50-year-old tower (younger than I am) has become a nostalgic symbol of the recent past.

From the Times article:

“For my father’s generation, Tokyo Tower was the symbol of the new Tokyo that they wanted to build,” said Midori Tajima, 60, who owns a camera shop near the tower. “But for my generation, it has watched over us during 50 years when everything else seemed to be changing.”

Happy New Year!
Even though I live in New York, I have never been to Times Square on New Year's Eve, but on many a December 31, I have watched the ball drop on television. I am not keen on big, noisy crowds or standing around on frigid nights. Last year, the ball drop passed its 100th anniversary: twice as old as the Tokyo Tower.

Recently I passed through a newly renovated subway tunnel connecting the various subway lines that meet at the Times Square subway station. Following the tradition of subway mosaics that represent something related to the place above ground, a new set of mosaics shows a variety of New Year's revelers wearing New Year's hats and blowing horns and noisemakers. Some are carrying children on their shoulders, some are in couples or small groups, some alone.

This perhaps has become the meaning we give to the place, Times Square. It is the place where the nation marks the beginning of each new year. This has a lot to do with the way New Year's Eve is celebrated in the USA. It is the highlight of the party calendar, the
date for which you must have a date. It's not particularly a time to spend with your family, especially when you are young and nearly adult. Times Square means nightlife, writ large, and as the meaning of nightlife has changed over time, so has Times Square. The history of what used to be known as Longacre Square involved the brothels and sex shops of a red light district, which still marked the Times Square area long into the 1980s. But the district also was home to the Broadway theaters and "Restaurant Row" making it the city's most famous nightlife spot for tourists. Advertisers took advantage of the crowds with huge billboards.

In recent years the lights are so bright on Broadway that it looks like daytime even at midnight. The city has managed to remove much of the "red light" from the area and substituted the bright lights of consumerism. In spite of the $100 and more per ticket, and in part
thanks to Disney productions, Broadway theater patrons include many children, including always the precious 11- and 12-year-old girls who dress up for the occasion of their big night out more than anyone else in the theater.

And what is Times Square as a landmark? It hasn't been the home of the New York Times in decades. The buildings have changed over the years. Times Square is essentially a messy intersection caused by the diagonal street Broadway which crosses over 7th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets. But that's more where you stand to look at the building on 42nd between 7th Avenue and Broadway, which is "One Times Square" -- the building that used to be owned by the New York Times and where the crystal ball drops down the 77-foot (about 25 meter) flagpole to the roof of the building.

Why do so many flock to this "bowtie" intersection, passing through checkpoints, unable to bring any bags or backpacks, dressed for arctic temperatures? Only because they've given this place a meaning that approaches magic. It's become a destination on a journey, a place to mark the passage of time. And this is how we give meaning to a place.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education & Research

AFS International

link to previous post with video from Times Square

Times Square photo credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Times_Square_Evening.jpg

Color Blind.

I have been following the Brother Peacemaker blog written by an African American man living in Saint Louis. I don't even remember how I came across this blog, but it interested me because my focus is mostly on cultural differences on an international level, but in fact it isn't necessary to cross political borders to encounter cultural differences. It is always my hope that the lessons learned by AFS students living in another country for a year, a semester, or even shorter programs will also take root in their ability to deal with cultural differences they encounter at home. Yet sometimes I worry that this doesn't happen, particularly when the research we've done shows that most of our returnees, our volunteers, and even our staff tend to relate to others primarily on what we all have in common - our basic humanity. This may sound like a positive approach, but as the blog entry cited above complains, ignoring a very obvious difference may not be helpful in building relationships.

The research we have done with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), Mitch Hammer's assessment tool based on Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, shows that it is not only in the USA that minimization of cultural differences takes place. It doesn't happen that we overlook difference in every context, but it is particularly odd when we take pains to overlook differences that are highly visible, such as skin color.

Many years ago, a friend of mine took her small son into a shop with her. The little boy had not trained himself to minimize differences, or to concern himself with who might hear what he had to say. Instead he was intent on understanding what made other people different. Much to his mother's embarrassment, he pointed to another customer in the store and asked, "Right, Mom? That man's black?" It was just a question, and the African American customer so pointed out was amused, not offended. And though she answered her son with a quick, "That's right, dear," my friend would have much preferred to be invisible at that moment. She wondered herself why she felt that way. I also wonder why we do this. Is noticing differences so embarrassing?

Privilege, Power and Inequality.  Perhaps our effort to be color blind comes from the tension between our awareness of the inequality of privilege or power that exists between us, and our belief that such inequality should not exist. Any marker of a difference between us may be seen as a reminder of the inequality that we are suddenly overly conscious of. If instead we can view this person as being "just like me," the reminders of inequality disappear along with the differences.  

Tolerance and Conformity. When we minimize cultural differences we may also be dealing with a tension between a desire for conformity and a belief that we should tolerate differences. We can tolerate differences if they are not particularly important; if they are just variations on a theme. Life still seems organized and predictable if we are mostly the same, and if we are the same in all the ways that are important. With this stability, the small variations can even add some interest.

Inherent in the color blindness is certainly an avoidance of tension, and an avoidance of judgment. We do not have to be "for" or "against" in our dealings with people from other cultures and groups. Minimizing cultural difference is non-judgmental, but it is not necessarily open to the important differences that come with our membership in particular cultural groups. Relationships can be built on the appreciation of difference and trust can be established in many ways; we don't need to always look for the similarity first.

My particular cultural group celebrates Christmas this week, and with that comes a whole mixture of feelings from frustration to calm, from joy to depression. There is a group history as well as a personal history for me, and right now if feels very much part of who I am and what I'm doing: so much so, that I can't overlook it.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International