Cross Cultural Encounters

This week has been an interesting one as far as cultural exchange goes. Last night I sat down with my host parents for dinner and had a great time trying to communicate. Their English isn’t great, but we gave it our best. There were some awesome parts, talking about church and family and being blessed by God. But other things we didn’t make much headway on. Lolo (Grandfather in Tagalog) tried to share some thoughts on Saudi Arabia, where his one son is working, but was limited to “Much Muslim. Bad.” When they asked about 9/11 I knew any sort of actual explanation was just not happening. Apparently something happened with N. Korea in the news yesterday and the only explanation I could get was “Korea open”. Still, it was great to try, and both sides got some laughs. Perhaps the most entertaining part of this conversation occurred after I had said my goodnights and began to head upstairs as they unrolled their sleeping mats on the floor. At this point, Lolo began motioning towards the bathroom, and trying to ask me a question, “If you origin?” After communicating firmly that I didn’t understand, this became “what you origin?” and the motioning towards the bathroom became motioning towards his lower regions. While I had to agree with him that we all kind of originate from there, I was still clueless about what he was asking me. We agreed that this was going nowhere, and I headed to bed.

Today, with the help of the local pastor and my translator for the day it was revealed that the word he was searching for was “urine” not “origin”. As they sleep basically in the way of the bathroom, he was trying to reassure me that I could turn on the light and use it in the night without bothering them. Glad to have that mystery solved.

Luckily, not all my cross cultural exchanges have been this mystifying. This afternoon we went to a mall, and over coffee at Dunkin Doughnuts the Filipina pastora, a Korean FH HungerCorps member and I had an amazing conversation. Great time talking about just about anything. Covered our frustrations with ministry (If you are bringing your two toddlers to a feeding program because they are malnourished, why in the world are you pregnant again? Someone needs to revoke your babymaking rights if you can’t feed the ones you have). We covered our mutual agreement that while these people live in grinding poverty, being wealthy enough to have a house, food, clothing, etc. can be a double edged sword. In America many people have little in the way of physical needs, but that can easily translate into not needing God either. We suffer the consequences in spiritual poverty in things like violence, drug use, depression, obesity, divorce, pornography, suicide, etc. Not that the poor don’t also battle these things, but the concept of grace and Jesus as the bread of life becomes much easier to understand when you have to literally pray for your daily bread.

Other cultural exchanges have been the difference in global restaurant/fast food chains. Like the McDonald’s/Wendy’s/KFC all serving spaghetti in the Philippines. The only really strange thing about Dunkin Doughnuts for Claire (the Korean) and I was how the pricing works. One doughnut, 10 pisos (about 25 cents). A dozen doughnuts, 120 pisos. Listed right next to each other on the menu. So… buying a dozen doesn’t get you any kind of discount. In fact, no quantity of doughnuts would make the price any cheaper. In America, if you get a dozen, it’s at least half as cheap per doughnut than only buying one, and apparently this is true in Korea as well. But not in the Philippines… makes you wonder why they even put the price for a dozen.

Also, family life is a lot different. In America you might be encouraged to “graduate college, get a job, work for a few years and save money so you can get married and buy a house.” In the Philippines, that advice would look like this “graduate, move home for 2 years, get a job so you can support your parents, get married, but then, why not stay at home so you can still support your parents?” In general, life here is much more family focused. Claire also echoed the sentiment that as an unmarried woman in either the Phps. or Korea you are still pretty much under the protection and rule of your parents. No offense to other cultures... but somethings make me glad to be from my own.