I’m a bit out of words lately. I’m in seminary full-time. Covid. Elections. Wars. Planes crashing. Racial tension. Political violence. Conspiracy theories.
It’s a lot.
I have way more questions than answers. Some of my questions are around the gaps in the training I received before moving abroad and in the ongoing trainings and mentorships I have access to. By not addressing these gaps, we risk perpetuating problems as expatriates continue to export our culture and values without fully engaging in our new contexts.
I’m going to share some of the questions I am asking myself. I hope you will take some time to think about them.
Do you know the history of your host country from the perspective of its citizens?
Ancient history, precolonial history, colonial history, and post-colonial history?
National heroes? Legends, myths, folktales?
Religious history, from multiple perspectives?
Racial, class, gender history?
When did women gain the right to vote? How many women serve in leadership? How are they perceived?
Did your country have slavery? Were the people enslaved by others?
What have been recent and historic conflicts? What were they about? How were they resolved?
Do you know what role your passport nation has played in any of this history?
Did you learn this from Westerners writing about them or from them? Does this knowledge come tainted from an outsider’s viewpoint?
Do you read book written by authors from your host country?
Do you listen to local music?
Do you read the local newspaper, listen to the radio, follow leaders on social media?
Do you know how people view people of your gender, race, ethnicity, class, stature? Do you know why?
Do you know what people who look like you have done here in the past? For better and for worse?
I meet far too many people who could care less about these things in the countries where they work and are supposedly “serving.” I don’t understand how a person hopes to “make a difference” if they don’t know how things are. What do they hope will be “different?” Unless they mean more like themselves.
Before leaving your passport nation there are some things you need to do, namely start learning about where you are going and commit to never, never stopping. Those of us who are already gone need to do this work.
I now believe ongoing local cultural training must be required by all organizations who send people abroad. I don’t mean “culture” like food and clothing and language. I mean deep, heart level, historic, worldview forming topics. The possibilities are endless.
What would you add?
