Monday, May 9, 2011

What is baseline cultural stress?

This note goes along with our May monthly email newsletter.

In our home culture, it was fairly easy to fake belonging. You can feel like you belong when you're driving on streets you know, shopping at familiar stores, or watching the Badgers kick somebody's butt in any given sport. Here, belonging is a bit more challenging, because you're always facing
baseline cultural stress.

Baseline cultural stress is the white noise behind our life here. Sometimes it’s a quiet hum, and sometimes it’s a dull roar. We genuinely feel at home inside our apartment (praise the Lord!), but away from the house, we often feel like outsiders. It’s not necessarily any one cultural strain. Language? Sure, that can be taxing (though we can usually both communicate fairly effectively). Life in a foreign city? That, too (though I love the metro and the sense of history). More than these or others, it’s the cumulative effect, which builds into the feeling that we don't belong. Unfortunately, this can even be amplified by honest thoughts on missionary service - all other things being equal, a native is always the better person for the job than a foreigner, and I’ll always be one and not the other here.

I’ve called it more of a background noise, but that’s not to say we don’t have moments where cultural stress drowns everything else. One day in early April, we went to get Andrew’s immunizations but didn’t bring a particular piece of paper (one we had no way of knowing we would need). About a week later, we were grocery shopping and shrimp was on our list - Meggan had given me permission to cook seafood for the first time since moving here. I wanted to buy fresh shrimp, but the seafood counter was incredibly busy, and I didn’t have the energy to learn a new system under increased social pressure, so I opted for the frozen product (in rather a greater quantity than we needed). While we eventually move on from each individual incident, the continual possibility of another such incident rising adds another layer to the mix.

We then find ourselves not always knowing how to interpret our issues. What percentage of our parenting stress is related to cultural stress? What percentage would we be facing wherever we lived? How much of our extended family stress is related to our distance from home versus normal family dynamics... and, honestly, how much family stress is actually relieved by living far away? And how do we relieve the destructive, unnecessary guilt that last bit creates?

Check out our monthly newsletter for a bit more resolution.