Reflections on Bolivia: Culture Shock

Now that I´ve got my next step figured out and I´m sort of beginning to look towards the end of all this I´m trying to pick apart my experiences and how I´ve changed. I suppose all of this will be much more evident once I´m back in the US, back home, and can see the experience in the context of my reality before I left. If that makes sense.

Culture shock is such a strange experience and so so dangerous. There´s the initial bit which seems harsh, but isn´t anything to what´s gonna come. The food´s weird and you like it or you don´t, jet lag, language issues, altitude and weather, figuring out how to interact with the people you´re now living and working with. All of this, for me, has always been vaguely exciting and wonderful. Even when it sucked and I had diarrhea like crazy and didn´t understand how water stuff worked, it was all just an adventure, something I knew I would adjust to. This happened here, in Berlin, in Oxford, and it will happen again in Thailand. This is the easy part.

The real culture shock, what I think of when I think of culture shock, comes later and slowly but surely and makes life really hard. It comes when things stop being novel and you speak enough of the language to get yourself around. When you´re settled with your family and the differences stop being interesting and you have to start reconciling them to your own boundries, cuz like it or don´t we all have boundries that can be stretched but cannot be ignored. It comes when the stomach cramps continue after 3 months and you start to get sick of finding hairs and rocks and bugs and eggshells in your food. it comes when you´re tired of reporting your whereabouts and when you´ve had enough of missing what´s going on around you. It comes when you have laughed at yourself one too many times.

Here, my lowest point was after New Year´s when a member of my family had taken advantage of me, work was not going well, and I had just about had enough of so many things that were hard to stomach like lack of concern for safety, cruelty to the poor and to animals, machismo, and the postal system. I wrote frantic emails trying to find some sort of insight, some game plan to make everything less difficult. I got the support I needed and made it past that point but nothing´s easy.

Reverse culture shock is something I´ve never really experienced. A friend of mine had a wicked time after her junior year abroad and I just didn´t get it. This time, I have a feeling it will be different.

Having lived in England for a year, I think I learned some really important things about living in a cross-cultural environment. Oxford was deceptive, at first. We speak the same language, the food´s not THAT different and on the whole I understood what was happening around me. So I thought. It is exactly because the languages are essentially the same that I missed the fact that we could say the same things but mean something completely different. That social interactions were subtly different, that expectations were not the same. I loved Oxford, but that was a slow and gentle lesson in what it is to live outside of your home culture.

So much change has taken place in me in these months in Cochabamba. I´ve learned so much, language, about microcredit, about being an outsider and about my own boundries. I´m interested and a little scared to see what happens when I go back home.