Sometimes, friends from another culture experiment with violating the norms of their culture around you. It’s as if your foreignness creates a little bubble where they can safely break certain cultural laws of behavior and decorum. This is usually all fine and well – but only if you know it’s happening. When you don’t know it’s happening or don’t see it coming, it gets downright confusing, as nobody knows which rules are still in effect.
Why is your local friend not fighting you when you offer to pay for their lunch? Arguing over the bill is the respectable thing to do. Is that male student making casual eye contact during conversation with your wife because he is being inappropriate, or because he finds it refreshing that foreign women will actually talk to him like his sisters will? Did that person really just accept your honorable yet hypothetical offer to buy them a very expensive plane ticket? How did they miss the cues of what is, after all, their culture, not yours?
Our local friends can see when we are doing our best to become acceptable outsiders in their culture. But because we can never fully become cultural insiders, they must meet us part-way, which means altering some of their behavior for our sakes. One principle of cross-cultural relationships is that whenever genuine relationship is present, cultural adaptation is always flowing both ways, whether this is recognized or not. We become like our friends, and it’s always been this way.
Sometimes, however, your friends jump at the chance to do things differently, and when they do that without explaining what’s going on, you can get caught quite flat-footed. Here, I am reminded of a local friend who came to stay with us one summer. Last-minute hosting for a night or two is very normal in the traditional culture of the area. But local wisdom says that guests are like fish – after three days they start to stink. This friend stayed for nine nights, and all indications were that he intended to keep staying. Exhausted, we eventually planned a trip out of town so that we had a mutually face-saving way to kick him out.
Another example of this happened right after our youngest was born. My wife had made the brave choice to give birth in-country, and the experience was, shall we say, mixed. Because the umbilical cord was around our son’s neck, the doctors decided a C-section was necessary. When administering the anesthesia into her spine, however, they poked too many holes in the spinal cord lining. This meant that a lot of my wife’s spinal cord fluid escaped, leaving her bedridden for a week and with a tremendous headache and pain whenever she viewed light, or tried to sit up or walk around.
The upside of giving birth in-country was the care we received from the believing foreigners and locals. Our fridge quickly ran out of space for all the food we were given, and many local friends came for the congratulatory post-birth visits, which typically last 15-20 minutes. Local culture is practical in this way, respecting the family by visiting, but also giving a nod to the fact that moms who have just given birth aren’t in much shape to host. In our case, my wife was bedridden in a darkened room and in no shape for even much conversation, so I did my best to serve chai and sweets to the guests, show off the newborn in between feedings and diaper changes, make conversation, corral our kids, toggle the house electricity as it came and went, and make regular trips back to the bedroom to see if my wife needed more pain meds. Not for the last time, I thought to myself how utterly practical the extended family model of living is, where these responsibilities would be spread out among various relatives, and not all fall on one parent.
Most of our friends gave their gifts, read the room, and after twenty minutes or so announced they had to be going, politely refusing my multiple offers for them to stay longer. One couple, however, got caught in the foggy no man’s land of cross-cultural relationships I have described above. When I protested their departure – “But it’s still so early!” – they looked at one another, smiled, and then sat back down. Oh no, I thought to myself, it’s happened again. The wires of our different cultures have crossed. Three hours later, they were still there.
When midnight came, I was utterly at a loss for how to communicate that it would be super helpful if they left. I really didn’t want to offend them. The husband was a new believer with a very sensitive and emotional personality. His wife, not yet a believer, was literally a sniper in the local armed forces. So, I just kept the chai and sunflower seeds flowing and became an expert in how my wife was supposed to eat a gnarly flour/sugar/oil paste that locals swear by for a post-birth recovery diet. After all the visits, we had ended up with a massive bowl of the stuff in our fridge.
Sometime after midnight, our guests stood up again and announced they really needed to be going. This time, I couldn’t bring myself to honorably protest. Instead, I squeaked out something open to interpretation like, “Wow, what a time we’ve had, eh?” and we proceeded to say goodbye dozens of times as we shuffled out the door, through the courtyard, and to the outer gate.
I went back inside and saw that there would still be about 20 minutes of electricity before it would shut off for the night.
“Are they gone?” my wife groaned when I went back to check on her.
“Yes, they just left,” I said.
“Wow, they are… sweet… but what happened? Why did they stay for four hours?”
I just shrugged, “I have no idea…”
“Hey,” I smiled, “want some of that yummy paste stuff?”
My wife made a gagging face, laughed, regretted laughing, and proceeded to settle down for a couple hours of sleep before our son’s next feeding.
If you have cross-cultural friendships, look out for the no man’s land, when because of contact with you, your friends begin unexpectedly experimenting with their own rules. When this happens, the normal rules go out the window – and you may find yourself very much in the fog.
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Photos are from Unsplash.com
Entrusted to the Dirt 