Survival Kit for Overseas Living by L. Robert Kohls

Author:L. Robert Kohls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2001-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

19

Responding to Culture Shock

Culture shock is virtually inevitable in some degree, and there are no magic charms to escape it altogether. There are, nevertheless, things you can do, positive steps you can take to minimize the impact—and the sooner you take them, the better. Here’s our prescription for action.

1. Realize that in fact practically everybody who goes overseas for a substantial period of time experiences culture shock in some form and/or to some degree. It’s natural and not a sign that you’re deficient or strange—and you’ll live through it as thousands of others have.

2. Be ready for the lesson culture shock teaches. Culture is a survival mechanism which tells its members not only that their ways of doing things are right but also that they are superior. Culture shock stems from an in-depth encounter with another culture in which you learn that there are different ways of doing things that are neither wrong nor inferior. It teaches a lesson that cannot be learned as effectively by any other means, that one’s own culture does not possess the single right way, best way, or even a uniformly better way of providing for human needs and enjoyments. Believing it does is a kind of imprisonment from which the experience of culture shock, as painful as it may be, can liberate you.

3. Pack your copy of Survival Kit for Overseas Living and reread it when you’re feeling down or uncertain about what is happening.

4. Return to chapter 13, “Know Thy Host Country,” and pursue your information gathering assiduously. Go back to chapter 14, “Let’s Play Q and A,” and search out the answers you missed before. Develop a structured plan and a daily schedule for doing your research. Use all the native informants, sympathetic expatriates, and helpful books you can find as sources.

5. Select one or two areas of interest and investigate them more thoroughly than the other topics. If you are a fan of American football, for example, don’t just sit around and grouse about missing games. Cultivate an interest in their football (soccer) or other national sports.

6. Begin (if you haven’t done so already) to look consciously for logical reasons behind everything in the host culture that seems strange, difficult, confusing, or threatening. Take every aspect of your experience and look at it from their perspective. Search for patterns and interrelationships. You may be surprised to find that the pieces fit together once you discover where they go. Relax your grip on your own culture a little in the process. There’s no way you can lose it any more than you could forget your knowledge of English by learning another language.

7. Try to trace every “strange” action you observe in your new culture to its underlying value or values. An illustration in reverse, out of our own culture, will make the point.

An Egyptian visitor to the United States was shocked at what he witnessed, firsthand, in the Air and Space Museum gift shop in Washington, D.C. There, he saw a young

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