This is an ongoing process; you will always have some culture shock, though it does get better over time. But when you're feeling adrift in your host country:
- Talk to family/friends back home. Even if your college roommate doesn't totally understand why you want to reminisce about the diner that had the awesome mashed potatoes, she'll probably be willing to chat about it. Understand that time differences are problematic and attempt to schedule times on the weekend/during holidays or school breaks to Skype with loved ones, since your schedules are likely out of sync then.
- Use Facebook/twitter to share things you are learning about your host country with friends. Who knows, your friends (or their friends who see their comments) may have insight or advice that makes it easier to understand the more baffling parts of your host culture.
- Indulge yourself (when practical). Even if no one else in your host country appreciates peanut butter and banana sandwiches, if they make you happy and aren't cost prohibitive, go for it. If you can share the wonder that is a PBB sandwich with an open-minded local, great, but if not, don't be ashamed for eating American comfort food instead of the local fare when you need a pick-me-up. Splurge on items (food, books, DVDs of a favorite TV series) that make you happy (if they don't break the bank or offend local sensibilities).
- Always have something to look forward to. This can be as minimal as a new film starring your favorite actor that premieres in 2 weeks, or as big as a vacation you'll go on in 3 months. It often makes your contract go faster to think of time in blocks of things to look forward to: in 6 weeks, I'll go on a weekend trip to a resort, and 3 months later, my sister comes to visit. As the years pass, you can also mark milestones like “That's the last graduation/ freshman orientation/ Ramadan I have to deal with”.
- Make friends with people you probably wouldn't be friends with back home. You may find that you have friends of wildly varying ages or from countries you know nothing about. Embrace this, even if you're frustrated that no one living in your host country has ever heard of your favorite band/movie/comic book or is even remotely close to your age/marital status. If you are a parent, you will make friends with the other parents at your child's school (or playgroup) fairly quickly.
- Accept that it may be difficult at first to make friends with "the locals" other than (maybe) your co-workers. Residents of your host country may have inaccurate beliefs or stereotypes about Americans based on Hollywood movies or syndicated American television shows and be wary of getting to know you; this may be especially true if you are working in a city/region that doesn't get a lot of Western tourists. Joining clubs or organizations (churches, parents groups) that locals belong to will net you more opportunities than joining groups populated mostly by expats (book discussion clubs, foreign language classes).
- Savor the opportunities this assignment affords you. While there will be stress in adapting to your host country's culture, try to appreciate the advantages. It might be high salary, proximity to places you want to travel, or opportunity to immerse yourself in opportunities/ language /culture, or maybe all three. If you moved from the Midwest to the Caribbean, go snorkeling/ scuba diving/ windsurfing at least every 8 weeks. Don't dwell on the ways your new place sucks compared to the US; embrace the things it has that America doesn't.
- Keep a journal/ blog. Blogging is practical, since many of your friends and relatives will want to know how you are faring, and it prevents you from having to write the same emails over and over again. You can keep a "just for me" blog if you don't feel like sharing but want a record that you don't have to regularly back up.
If you're worried about stepping on toes by making negative comments about your host country, most blog platforms will let you post under an alias, as long as you have a (non-public) email address associated with your blog. This way you can be critical about your experiences (within reason) and not worry about your boss/ barista/ plumber accidentally googling a screed you wrote about how TV there sucks and knowing you're the one who wrote that. You can give the blog URL to folks back home, and anyone who finds you through google won't be the wiser (unless you explicitly mention your position title or where you work, so don't do that in an anonymous blog).
And at year 2, you can go back and read all the stuff you wrote during year one and see how much better you're doing now.
Sometimes you will run into aspects of your host culture that you don't know how to deal with
Kate says:
While writing this part of the post I have the theme song from the '80s show "Facts of Life" running through my head - "you take the good, you take the bad...." The UAE is a fabulously wealthy country where only 20% of the population are citizens who control that wealth. It's also a country built on cheap, imported labor. The average nanny in the UAE makes room and board plus 800 Dhs a month, while working 6 days a week (but really working more like 7 days a week on 12 hour shifts.) In USD that would be $216 a month, and of that many of the workers send a majority of their income back home to their families. In my university (which is pretty typical for the country) faculty make an average of 14,000 - 25,000 AED per month ($3800 to $6800), while staff workers make 5,000 to 8,000 AED per month ($1400 to $2200).
As a result, this creates socioeconomic stratification; there are layers to the UAE economy that I never see or interact with. I don't shop at the same stores that laborers shop at, and my weekly grocery bill is around 600 Dhs. because I buy western expat style foods. As a middle class American, I never really had to interface with these kinds of issues at this level before. As someone who needs a nanny/domestic worker in my employ so that I can attend to my job, I have had to think long and hard about my behavior and my personal standards and ethics in this situation. I pay above the average, have supported Kumari (my nanny) in endeavors such as getting her driver's license, and give her access to my car. And I know that my "kindness" is a temporary stop in her life. I have no control over her working conditions when I leave. I can only hope that she continues to get employers who value her work and the way domestic workers ease our lives so that we can live and work in the UAE and have our families with us.
Lara says:
Fiji also has a gulf between what professionals and expats are paid versus what what semi-skilled laborers earn. At this point, there is no national minimum wage across the board, though FJ$2 (about US$1.10) per hour has been suggested by various NGOs and government studies. Because it's a developing country with cheap labor and rapidly growing urban areas, there is a trend toward people moving from the villages to the capital city (where I work) to try to earn money (village life is primarily subsistence agriculture). But rent in the capital is expensive if you have a retail job or drive a taxi, and the rental market is geared towards expat workers, since most Fijians live with extended family and don't tend to move around to the degree Americans do. So there are squatter settlements on the edge of town that resemble the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression: shacks of corrugated metal or scavenged lumber in close proximity to one another without electricity, plumbing or modern toilets.
As shocking as it is to see the squatter settlements, many people in established rural villages also lack constant electricity, running water or flush toilets. While the thatched huts from vintage postcards have been replaced by concrete block houses, there are many people on the main island who live within a 20 minute drive of a supermarket and retail stores but get their water from rain-collection tanks and use a generator for electricity. The income disparity between expats and rural folks in Fiji is difficult for most Americans to accept, though on the up side, there is almost no such thing as being "homeless" and even rural families with no income generally have gardens and fishing nets to provide a healthy (if sometimes monotonous) diet.
There is an American tendency to equate "poverty" with "squalor", which is absolutely not the case in Fiji, and recognizing that is sort of a culture shock moment in itself. In fact, compared to the vast income disparity between rich and poor in the US, the wealth gap in Fiji isn't so wide; my furnished expat apartment kitchen uses the same butane gas canister setup for cooking that's used in rural villages, and there are no billionaires here (let alone dozens of them).
While writing this part of the post I have the theme song from the '80s show "Facts of Life" running through my head - "you take the good, you take the bad...." The UAE is a fabulously wealthy country where only 20% of the population are citizens who control that wealth. It's also a country built on cheap, imported labor. The average nanny in the UAE makes room and board plus 800 Dhs a month, while working 6 days a week (but really working more like 7 days a week on 12 hour shifts.) In USD that would be $216 a month, and of that many of the workers send a majority of their income back home to their families. In my university (which is pretty typical for the country) faculty make an average of 14,000 - 25,000 AED per month ($3800 to $6800), while staff workers make 5,000 to 8,000 AED per month ($1400 to $2200).
As a result, this creates socioeconomic stratification; there are layers to the UAE economy that I never see or interact with. I don't shop at the same stores that laborers shop at, and my weekly grocery bill is around 600 Dhs. because I buy western expat style foods. As a middle class American, I never really had to interface with these kinds of issues at this level before. As someone who needs a nanny/domestic worker in my employ so that I can attend to my job, I have had to think long and hard about my behavior and my personal standards and ethics in this situation. I pay above the average, have supported Kumari (my nanny) in endeavors such as getting her driver's license, and give her access to my car. And I know that my "kindness" is a temporary stop in her life. I have no control over her working conditions when I leave. I can only hope that she continues to get employers who value her work and the way domestic workers ease our lives so that we can live and work in the UAE and have our families with us.
Lara says:
Fiji also has a gulf between what professionals and expats are paid versus what what semi-skilled laborers earn. At this point, there is no national minimum wage across the board, though FJ$2 (about US$1.10) per hour has been suggested by various NGOs and government studies. Because it's a developing country with cheap labor and rapidly growing urban areas, there is a trend toward people moving from the villages to the capital city (where I work) to try to earn money (village life is primarily subsistence agriculture). But rent in the capital is expensive if you have a retail job or drive a taxi, and the rental market is geared towards expat workers, since most Fijians live with extended family and don't tend to move around to the degree Americans do. So there are squatter settlements on the edge of town that resemble the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression: shacks of corrugated metal or scavenged lumber in close proximity to one another without electricity, plumbing or modern toilets.
As shocking as it is to see the squatter settlements, many people in established rural villages also lack constant electricity, running water or flush toilets. While the thatched huts from vintage postcards have been replaced by concrete block houses, there are many people on the main island who live within a 20 minute drive of a supermarket and retail stores but get their water from rain-collection tanks and use a generator for electricity. The income disparity between expats and rural folks in Fiji is difficult for most Americans to accept, though on the up side, there is almost no such thing as being "homeless" and even rural families with no income generally have gardens and fishing nets to provide a healthy (if sometimes monotonous) diet.
There is an American tendency to equate "poverty" with "squalor", which is absolutely not the case in Fiji, and recognizing that is sort of a culture shock moment in itself. In fact, compared to the vast income disparity between rich and poor in the US, the wealth gap in Fiji isn't so wide; my furnished expat apartment kitchen uses the same butane gas canister setup for cooking that's used in rural villages, and there are no billionaires here (let alone dozens of them).
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