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.