Conference

A few months ago our team had a spiritual retreat. This was unique in that the entire team participated including local staff. In the past, retreats have been held in another country with a variety of teams getting together and thus local staff were unable to attend due to the cost. This time it was decided to have it on our compound and include everyone. The theme was Transforming to God's Culture. As a result there was lots of discussion about what things in each person's culture were good, bad, or neutral based on Biblical principles. One of the things I enjoyed was hearing the perspective of the local staff. In our orientation training we were told to expect differences but its much more interesting to hear someone talk about their personal culture and thought processes. During this time I also got some hands on experience in dealing with these differences. On the first day of the conference I got a call from one of my friends at another organization who was travelling through the capital on her way home She was assisting a mother and daughter in getting home as they had just been to a nearby country for surgery. The problem was that although all 3 were booked onto the same flight, the mother/daughter got bumped off while my friend was still supposed to fly out. There was no way my friend wanted to leave this woman in an unfamiliar city on her own so could they stay with us overnight and be assisted to the airport for the next flight out? Having her over was a very interesting experience. Although she was familiar with many things from her time in the big city, I still ran into some cultural/lifestyle issues. One thing that was really helpful for me was to mentally put myself in her lifestyle to understand why she did things. Its amazing how differently we do things subconsciously and don't think about why we do what we do. For instance, the woman was not bothered at all by all the food crumbs her child dropped while wandering around the house eating her meal. From my perspective this would be odd and alot of work to clean up the mess. Looking at it from her perspective, they eat meals outside so kids wandering around and dropping food is no big deal. The cultural differences then made more sense to me and I was better able to adapt to how she does things and not be annoyed by the things that didn't seem right in my mind.