..New tools to deal with culture shock, health and safety, integration and power and privilege…
I think in this post, I’m going to highlight one key thing amongst the many that I learnt in the 14 hours of training today:
1. Integration – Integration isn’t solely about adopting a community’s approaches/beliefs or ideas. I believe integration is the ability to respect each others differences and trying to understand where each person is coming from. We performed skits on sensitive issues that reverberated with the group. Touchy issues such as vegetarianism, sexuality and abuse in the overseas context came up and it’s hard to assess the situation and to have clear cut answers of how to deal with something like relationships between husbands and wives or parents and their childern in the overseas households. I think I drew out of the session is that there are certain surface elements that we can see, touch, feel ..sense about a culture but behind each action, there’s a reason and it’s extremely crucial to try to understand these reasons behind the action.
