Culture Stress (Email to parents)

Hello!

Well, the second day is going okay. There are so many issues and things that we don’t know or don’t have control over that are a little stressful...

It was interesting, in the stress thing today, Barry put up a chart showing how we go through Culture Stress. There are various stages:

* “Fun/honeymoon stage”

* Flight/avoidance stage

* Anger (different and bad) or mockery (different and foolish)

* Indifference

* Fit/Acceptance (different, but okay)

* Understanding (different, but reasonable)

* Creativity (different, but open to living)

It was a neat chart with “length of stay”: being a factor as to when you hit different stages, but I can’t really draw it out here. On that chart also was a line with “desire to go home”- and it was funny because he said, “Some of you may have hit that already, or hit it at the airport!” I thought “yup.” Then Linda said, “I still think that at times, or feel that ‘oh I wish I could just go home.’ Wow, that was encouraging…could have been discouraging, but since I had felt that already and felt like that was something I was not supposed to/allowed to feel,
but then hearing Linda- a veteran Worker. Hearing that, I felt I was okay.