Tuesday, December 17, 2013

on critical incidents, slow lessons, and being an ambassador (sort of)

I've been thinking about intercultural everything lately and my deliberate and accidental studies on the subject, also about what it means to be perceived as a representative of a place and religion that I don’t feel comfortable representing. Ever since we put up our Christmas tree my kids have been bringing in their friends from our block to show them, and the Filipino manager of our compound was clearly heartwarmed when he came in to check on maintenance and saw it.  Both subjects lead me down the same path of having to be secure in myself to be able to handle the rest of the world.

A key part of my undergrad studies at the School for International Training was recognizing “critical incidents” in intercultural situations and trying to extract learning from them.  It was a challenging and uncomfortable assignment, as the critical incidents tended to be experiences that we’d otherwise want to forget as soon as possible- times we had committed some kind of embarrassing faux pas in an intercultural situation.  It’s only now that I’m teaching my kids, and that they are old enough to both reflect on their own mistakes and resist the whole process, that I’m really coming to appreciate the value of the exercise. 

Moving to Qatar is my critical incident, so far. I’m sick of the way moving so frequently makes me feel constantly a little off-kilter, but every so once in a while I get this little break where I have the time and space and presence of mind to reflect on where I’m at and I realize that I’m a hell of a lot stronger/more resilient/more tolerant than I was before I started in on this latest endeavor.  I don't linger on it, but it's a relief to be able to remind myself. Qatar's a critical incident because the more prickly and misfitted and grouchy I get as I struggle to get my bearings and support my kids (while trying to take it out on them as little as possible), the more I learn, and the steadier I feel in the moments in between that are thankfully getting longer and longer. 

Maybe I was just coasting along and the universe or whatever you want to talk about a force greater than each individual being (or the great force within each individual being) noticed I was not working hard enough and tried having me move around the world for 10 years or so. That was a good start but there was still more to learn, so then I got a couple of other jolts (which I choose not to share here), and I still didn’t get it. Finally we landed in San Francisco, which I tried valiantly not to care about (“these are not my hills! this is not my home!”) and fell in love with anyway… just in time for that home to be torn away from us/me.  I ended up being faced with a move to a country that was very near the bottom of the list of places I would ever consider living.  Still, at its very core, my nature is optimistic and curious. I figured that there must be something interesting about this new place even if my first impression was of a contrived artificial urban desert, heavy on consumerism, populated mainly by expats who are only biding their time until they can afford to go home again. Maybe it took this big of an upheaval in my life to start understanding the lessons from decades ago.  Maybe I’m a slow learner, and I’m thankful to be given the time to keep working on them.

The trick with the critical incident thing, that I hadn’t really understood before, is that it’s not an excuse to beat yourself up over whatever intercultural faux pas you just made- that just leads to wanting to retreat back to a more familiar milieu or at least avoid all the people involved.  It’s a chance to learn more about and share more with people and environment, adjust your behavior, and move on.


I’ve also been thinking about how I don't feel like an adequate representative for my very large and diverse home country or a religion in which I have not been an active member, if I can be said to be a member at all.   As far as I know we’re the only non-Muslim family in our compound.  I love the immersion of it, but I’ve wondered how we’re skewing the neighbor kids’ ideas of what an American is, and now that we’ve got a Christmas tree up we’re representing Christians too, though we don’t follow the precept of a particular church. Every time I get into a taxi I ask the driver where he’s from and usually he asks me, too.  Then when I say America he often smiles and says “America, it’s very good there?” and I invariably say, “it’s a big country, lotta people, there’s good and bad.”  More and more it doesn’t bother me that much now when people see me as expert on all things American, and now Christian, thanks to the tree.  Even if by some accounts I’m misleading people by not being a “typical” version of whatever it is I’m representing to people, I’m only offering up chances to learn down the road.  We are all critical incidents.  We learn by untangling our own confusion.  

In other news, my kids have been offered places at our chosen international school here so this first adventure in homeschooling will soon be over.  It has been like opening a door that seemed like it was leading to something small and limited and finding a big world I hadn’t even known existed on the other side, reminding me to not worry too hard about things I don’t yet know about. Despite my misgivings and disorganization and struggle with curriculum, I think we’ve done this right, maybe by mistake, maybe because most things, carried out with good intentions and focus on progress, no matter how slow, turn out to be their own path to something new. 

6 comments:

  1. "...at its very core, my nature is optimistic and curious" is the key. There's bound to be culture shock given the amount of time you've been in Doha, critical incidents if you will. As you mention, you have a rich tapestry of experiences to reference and cull lessons from. Being optimistic and curious - if only on the good days - will get you far. You've been developing, enhancing and replenishing your emotional resilience reserves all along.

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    1. Thanks, Linda, for reading this and commenting so thoughtfully. I have enjoyed the post-discussion about resilience and have added a favorite quote to the comments there that I came across this year that speaks to yet another way of thinking about it it: "can the events and accidents of life add up to a coherent story? That is every migrant’s question. And since these events and accidents are beyond an uprooted person’s control, the unity of a life story has to reside in the person telling it; unity, we would say, lies in the quality of the narrator’s voice. The narrator, following Pico’s precept, must learn how to tell about disorder and displacement in his or her own life in such a way that he or she does not become confused or deranged by the telling." -Richard Sennett, Humanism, from The Hedgehog Review, reprinted in Best American Essays 2012

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  2. I know what it's like to be the sole representative, or the first representative of what an American is to people from other parts of the world. It can be a little overwhelming. I always found that being American somehow lost its multidimensionality when I was overseas, which sometimes made it easier, but often made me feel like I wasn't representing the full picture. Since I don't identify as Christian, it is always interesting to me that most Middle Easterners (Muslim, Christian and others) assume that I am. I used to just go with it (path of least resistance). As I have gotten older, I explain my views more in depth if it seems that someone is interested, otherwise I try not to worry about it. People ultimately often see what they want to see. And frankly, I expect that you and your family are as good a representative of "America" as most of the people you meet are going to get - optimistic and curious. So many people aren't either of those things when they are in an unfamiliar situation. The Gulf is a strange and interesting tapestry of people from many parts of the world. I'm sure that even though it was not your first choice - or even your 50th - you will find some amazing take-aways from this experience that you never expected. And that in itself is kind of exciting - although usually not until retrospect sets in. :)

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    1. Thank you, Bethany! That's interesting that people in the Middle East automatically assume you're Christian- probably like how many Americans would assume they were Muslim- like you, I usually choose relationship-building over assumption-shattering, though if someone's interested and seems receptive, the discussion can go deeper. As I get older, maintaining one single absolute truth is not the most important thing anymore.

      Gaining that sense of "multidimensionality" of places I had rarely thought about before is one of the things I love most about living in different countries. And you're right- the Gulf is already growing on me, in all its strangeness and complexity!

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  3. I couldn't make it, and I feel frustrated. I thought it would be easy when my ex-husband got a job at the World Bank. After all they care about trailing spouses and provide lots of support. We relocated to DC, which sounded as an easy ride, easy city, nothing too complicated. We had no kids so things couldn't have been easier. He moved two months before I did and when I arrived I found myself wondering how I could fill my days. He was thrilled with his new work and couldn't understand why I was having such a tough time adapting to a great city as DC and why I was so worried about getting a new job. He was traveling almost two weeks a month and I freaked out at the idea of having kids with someone that was not going to there most of the time. I told him I couldn't do it and he just decided I was not the type of person he wanted to be with, I was not the perfect trailing spouse. I thought we had a great and solid relationship but after 20 years of marriage and three months in DC I had to leave because we were only discussing the same things over and over. I was afraid, I just hadn't have the time to adapt, find a job and enjoy our new life. I am still trying to come to terms with everything that happened to us, back in my home country, unemployed and deeply sad.

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    1. Ines, my heart goes out to you. It as never as easy at looks from the outside. Please write me at french.maria at gmail.com and we can talk more about this, less publicly, if you want. A friend just shared a beautiful and relevant article with me that your story makes me think of and I can pass that on to you also.

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