This is a journal entry—my stream-of-consciousness thoughts I still ponder nearly a year later as I try to figure out a very important topic to me: how do I teach culture to my children while trying but not truly understanding differences myself? Feel free to read it. Feel free to comment. Please don’t misjudge my honesty as I work through it.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Dear Travel Journal:
I jumped off my vanilla Salt Lake City flight to Detriot, boarded flight 5573 to JFK, and entered another world with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, speaking foreign languages. I looked forward and saw an Indian baby wrap her fingers around her mother’s finger instinctively. I watched one woman, head covered in a modern mauve scarf, smile to another woman with a stylish chocolate head covering. A million words of understanding transferred between smiles. It was a silent language foreign to me, yet intriguing at the same time. Questions spring to mind but go unanswered.
An African-American guy sits in 4A, sporting an intricate corn-row weave and is seated next to the modern head-covered woman. Observing the two side by side, I am astutely aware of how significant hair and head coverings are in politics, style, cultural traditions, religion, and storytelling. Storytelling? Because everyone has a story and tells it in their own ways—starting at the tips of their heads. Without the ability to speak to each other, how do we tell and understand our stories?
The Mary Englebright quote “Bloom where you are planted” both inspires and confines me. It releases me, empowers me, gives me ideas, and at the same time reminds me of entering a small opening to a bat cave while sea canoeing in Thailand—a claustrophobic, apprehensive moment that nearly shaved the skin right off the top of my nose. Restrictive. I could follow Englebright’s urge and create the most amazing cultural-awareness program in white city USA where I live. Bring the world to us, right? I could introduce a culture in my home on regular intervals by learning and preparing new recipes and such. I could, along with my children, visit exhibits. I could travel and bring back information and trinkets, and candy, of course. But, how do you bring a culture into your own living room—bring back the actual experiences that forever make you see life differently? How do you teach your kids culture?
How do you communicate the experience of visiting a guinea-pig-raising family who lived in a shed inside the gates of a used-car parts lot in Ecuador? Did I mention the dirt floors they slept on or the one room they cooked and ate and slept and reproduced in? We worshipped together every Sunday, where differences didn’t matter. They let us into their lives, and I walked away with friendships and something even more precious—perspective.
What about the “clean” river dividing Bangkok? The stark contrast of our dinner cruise with its exotic fruit and superficial conversation with Thai life around us. Children bathing in the water, squealing in delight, as their moms washed dishes next to them and their grandmothers on the other side collected leaves for their basket-weaving livelihood, making possible the family’s meager existence. Their eyes: deep, dark, seemingly knowing, but utterly, almost blissfully, ignorant. All living in the shadows of lavishly adorned temples and gold-plated Buddhas.
Or, what about the commute to and from work in Frankfurt, Germany? Eating vegetables and fruit bought at the train station or at corner markets. Running into stores from the rain to be totally avoided—ignored really—by shop girls. No fight over customers to increase their commission. Not wrong, just different. Looking in their eyes time and again to see the distrust and anger of a nation so torn apart and beaten that nothing makes much sense anymore—even more than sixty years later. Realizing that I just don’t understand—not the distrust, not the anger, and not the claim that Americans are too superficial when we are just open. Is being an extrovert so wrong? Again, not wrong, just different.
