Culture Shock: The Little Things Count in the Biggest Ways

I read this article on an expat site that was very insightful and encouraging to me. We didn't have any "formal" missionary training. This kind of training probably would have went over this exact topic. We prepared ourselves the best we could and dove into the water...the water being a foreign country. We are doing well I think with the occasional bumps here and there. Overall, I think we are adapting. Some days I love it and other days I wish I could hop on the next plane home. This is something we expected though. I think I'll do this article in a few pieces so as not to make one dreadfully long post.

So here goes the article:
One of the first things I noticed about China was that all the men carried purses and the women held hands. This phenomenon shot straight to the top of my list of "Weird World Wonders" and stayed there until a mere five minutes later, when I went looking for a bathroom at the airport and came face to face with my first squatty potty.

This was culture shock, pure and simple, and I was already moving from the first stage of it - the honeymoon, or tourist, stage, which I had entered before we ever left the States - into the second, the irritation-to-anger stage. Culture shock can mean many different things to many different people, and any kind of move - whether it be across town, across the country or across the planet - can create different kinds of trauma in different kinds of people. Kalvero Oberg first identified the five distinct stages of culture shock in 1958, and we know them today as:

* The honeymoon, or tourist, stage;
* The irritation-to-anger stage;
* The rejection/regression stage;
* The integration/assimilation stage;
* The reverse, or reentry, stage.

So here is a thought. we have been here a little over 3 months now. I have found us going around the honeymoon stage and the irritation to anger stage and a little bit in the rejection/regression stage, and then back to the honeymoon stage. At least we're not standing still. One of these days we will be back in America and missing Russia...