Friday, May 4, 2012

Week One From the Field: May 5 2012


Friday May 5 2012
I left the states 9 days ago. The progression through many of the steps mentioned in the prep course has been rapid and thorough. I can’t believe that my entire trip is 1/10 of the way done but it has been so memorable thus far.  I want in this post discuss my progression through the cycle of culture shock. In order to describe more uniformly my descent and partial recovery from culture shock I will use terminology and quotations from Spradely’s Coping With Culture Shock.
It was almost 6 hours after arriving into Chennai India on April 28 2012 that the first stages of culture shock set in. Really it was probably a combination of several factors that led to my initial frustrations. Up until this point in my journey I had slept a total of maybe 8 or 9 hours sporadically over the last 4 days with some of the worst and most uncomfortable sleep on the plane from LA to Hong Kong. Then I had a man spill his entire cup of coke on my leg and into my shoe on the same flight. Hong Kong was in the middle of a monsoon type down pour that soak all of our bags and clothes when they were being transferred between planes. On top of all of that we had a delayed flight leaving Hong Kong that set us back 5 hours. Thus all of these factors along with the dismal living conditions, smells and unrelenting heat that welcomed us in Chennai I was a bit overwhelmed rapidly upon arrival. This was when I left the honeymoon stage and moved straight into the bottom of the Irritation and Hostility Stage. This lasted pretty intensely for the rest of the first night. Saturday was a hard day for me. I was in a lull for almost 4 hours and it was really hard for me to communicate and even function at sometimes. For most of the time anything I did was with very little enthusiasm or emotion.
I knew from the reading that this was just a temporary stage of anxiety and frustration but I wanted out of it as soon as possible. Thus I decided to do the one thing that was for sure to work. Once I returned to our hotel that night I got straight on my knees in the bathroom and offered one of the most heartfelt prayers of my life. I poured out my heart in hopes that it would alleviate some of the heartache and discomfort that I was going through. It worked! I felt the one constant and contiguous feeling that from my childhood has comforted me in my moments of utter despair and pain. The relationship that I cultivated with the spirit on my mission and through out my teenage years was the only thing that brought me through that first day in the field. I learned that even in foreign and alien lands we must rely on the companionship of the spirit to really help us overcome life’s more difficult situations. It is the only thing that I had to rely on in such a foreign environement.

2 comments:

  1. Wah! I am glad you are feeling better. It is awesome that you could use the stuff we learned about in class to recognize and deal with culture shock like that. I mean, it may not be quite over yet, but that is way cool how you directly applied it like that. I wonder how things would have turned out if you hadn't been aware of what was going on. Are your living conditions dismal, or are you talking about Chennai/Tamil Nadu/India in general?

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  2. Hey! Thanks for posting about this and I hope things just continue to look and up and up! I'm flying out to India tomorrow and take comfort, also, in knowing that the spirit will accompany use where we go and despite any circumstance we can have comfort and overcome all things while learning so many things at the same time.

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