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.
