The Perspective Phase

I apologize for not updating this for a long time…lets blame it on...being so busy! Also I wanted to include some bad hair photos but asking for those had presented a personal safety risk. I will continue my search.

The following was an excerpt I wrote about integration for required reporting…

Integrating into my community has been somewhat of a process of evolution. Upon arriving to country your head is filled with so many different sights, sounds, ideas, and the like. It is easy to become completely swept up in whatever anyone with any credibility tells you about what you should be doing, should look like, how you should go about your business, and so on, to survive in Honduras, fit in per se. Those first voices are those of the training staff from Peace Corps and to a lesser extent your host family. The language barrier for most of us when we arrive to country is large enough to make what people tell us about Honduras, in English, the end all be all of how we understand our new surroundings. It is a necessary, though flawed, first step in the cross-cultural integration process with the time allotted (to many, two years may seem like a long time, however in the slow process of social integration it is not).

Next, comes the move to our prospective towns, or “sites”. Everything is still fresh and we (volunteers) find ourselves as impressionable as ever. Everything is new once again and we must manage home life with strange families, new work environments, religious and social pressures, lots of attention from sometimes unwanted places, and we revert, as a survival tool to what we’ve been told about how to react and carry ourselves in our towns. This is where the most intense language curve exists. We have to learn Spanish very fast in order to be functioning volunteers. With little Spanish it’s hard for anyone to trust the work you are doing. So we emulate what we hear, and what we see. I found myself trying hard to be much like everyone around me, right down to the crazy haircuts that, in my opinion, look funny on Hondurans, and terrible on white volunteers.

That all lasted for a while, and I’m sure everyone goes through this process to some degree and at varying speeds. My Spanish in the last year and 7 months has improved dramatically with persistence and help from my Spanish-English tutoring exchanges. And with time I have realized that there has been a paradigm shift in my thinking on what I consider being somewhat integrated and well integrated. The difference is personality. So much of one’s personality gets lost in the fumbling through language. The more I have found myself able to express how, and why I feel about something in a relative culturally sensitive manner, the more I have been able to find agreement and balance between who and where I was in my past life, and who and where I am today.

This is how I now define being well integrated, knowing where and how to draw the line in the sand. Know you will always be different than those around you to some degree, and using it to your advantage. Not sweating the small stuff; both literally and figuratively not enduring those pesky haircuts. It’s goal 1,2, and 3 and it’s so much more.