Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Moving

Wow it has been a quite awhile since I updated my blog! As an introvert my response to lots of changes and challenges is to withdraw and recover. That is what I have been doing for the past couple of weeks. Now however it is time to peek back out of my shell. So hi again world :) What have you been doing the last couple of weeks?

So time for a quick catch-up... I finished and traveled home to Everett from Cultural Adaptation Training on June 9th. Then I spent a week sorting, packing, and preparing to move to Oregon to live with my parents until my departure for Indonesia. The big move happened Father's Day weekend. If you have never tried to sort through a 1200 square foot house and get rid most of it I don't suggest you do it alone. Thankfully I had a great moving team! My parents were able to come up to help and my two of my sisters who live in Seattle also spent most of Saturday helping with the heavy lifting.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend and of my great crew!


Sisters Kara and Laura packing the U-haul
The sorting area - there is an actually a method to our madness

Mom climbing the walls to remove pictures


















Sisters hard at work
Settled in at my parent's house in Hood River, Oregon
It was a blessing to set-up my own bed at my parent's house and get settled! It is home for now with my cat Missy, Eduardo the wooden duck (a house-warming gift from my sisters five years ago when I first moved to Everett) and my parents.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Cultural Adjustment and Transition

"I have never used electricity. So I imagine that it is very hard for me to do that." Eating a package of butter. Learning how to throw trash in a garbage can instead of out the window. Eating a doughnut for the first time. Trying to figure out how Santa Claus is connected with the birth of Jesus.

These are just a few of the moments shown on the YouTube clip below. They were taken from the documentary God Grew Tired of Us, which chronicles the adjustment of several of the Lost Boys of Sudan to life in the United States. They make some very interesting and honest observations about life and people here in the US. 


So what does it feel like to adjust to a new culture? I am pretty sure sometime in your life you have made a big change. Maybe it was graduating from high school and going to college or moving from one place to another. During this change you went through a transition and got a small glimpse of what it is like to adjust to a new culture. You went from a place you knew to place you didn't and place where you were known to a place you weren't. Something as simple as making friends or figuring out how to buy food all of a sudden was different.

How to make this transition, adjust and thrive in a new culture is just one of the topics we have been learning about here at Cultural Orientation for Personal Effectiveness (COPE). I have spent the last two weeks at COPE, which is being held at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia Canada. Today is our final day of training. I will share a lot more in the coming weeks about topics we have learned about here and tell you more about this experience.