Postscript

All the women in the ICC course went out for lunch today. It was a lot of fun being able to spend some less formal time with all these ladies. All of us are living on campus, but the apartments are kind of spread apart. We don’t always have a chance to hang out after class.

Believe it or not, there are a number of Mexican restaurants in this area. This one was pretty good. They actually served chicken chilaquiles with green sauce, a dish I first tried in Mexico City and is now one of my favorites.

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We’ve switched apartments. It was too small, the fridge broke… Thankfully, a one bedroom apartment was available. Yes, a one bedroom is bigger than an efficiency. I feel like I can breathe again! So, after moving our stuff into our new apartment and cleaning up the old apartment, we decided it was time to stock up on some food. We went with Aileen to Super Walmart in Lancaster, SC. Ah, yes, it was wonderful–a little reminder of real life.

Read Aileen’s post from today.

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They set us up today…
A little trickery to prove a point…

We played a role-playing game of a market in another country. Half of us were vendors and half played buyers. We were all given cultural rules. What we didn’t find out until later was that the rules given to each group were so opposite that it made interaction impossible if you strictly adhered to them. I was a vendor. Jeff played a buyer. One of my rules was to ignore and not sell to people who were not of my same gender. So, I was ignoring all of these guys that came by my mat and wanted to buy something. I even threw out hints to them like, “I can’t talk to you because you are a man; why don’t you buy from that male vendor over there.” OK, the buyers cultural rules said that if someone ignores you, you have to insist that they recognize you. HA! The more I didn’t look at them, and ignored them, the more they got in my face. Yeah, it was making for some entertaining scenarios. At the end of the game only two transactions took place. Those transactions only happened because people fudged on their cultural rules a little.

The point of all this? No, it wasn’t to make us frustrated. It was to talk about how when we’re living in another culture we have to overcome some of our own cultural rules. We talked about suspending judgment, tolerating ambiguity, and thinking grey. How much of my own American culture do I assume is just correct? They got me thinking.

Check out what Aileen had to say about today.

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Our ICC classes began. We have lecture for about half a day, but a significant amount of homework each evening. We were told before we arrived not to plan anything, but seeing the schedule, makes me think we might have a little extra time to do some fun things.

There’s about 35 people in the course with us. We recognize a few people from our orientation training in November last year. More familiar faces. We’re all split into smaller table groups of about six. Each group has an ICC staff member. Ah, and husbands and wives are purposefully put into separate table groups.

The JAARS center is beautiful. It’s out in the country surrounded by fields and woods. The campus is spread out. We’re meeting in the IT building. There are several work buildings and a number of apartment buildings and houses available as temporary housing for missionaries. There’s even a hanger in the back of the campus that they use in-part for training and testing missionary pilots.

Check out Aileen’s posts for the last couple of days:
ICC Day One
ICC Day Two

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We left our nearly empty house yesterday and packed up for North Carolina. We’re going to be living at the JAARS center in Waxhaw, NC for a month and taking the Intercultural Communications Course (ICC). We don’t really know what to expect, but we’ve heard that it’s a good course. Our friend, Aileen, who we worked with us in Orlando, is also joining us. It’s nice that we’ll be sharing this experience with someone we know . See what she had to say about arriving here today.

We got in this morning and checked in to our rather small apartment. I had arranged for an efficiency for us, but this is really small–much smaller than I thought. We brought our bikes with us, and if the weather’s good, maybe we’ll get to take a few bike rides.

As I look at our calendar, I know that this is just the beginning of a lot of unsettle-ness that we will be experiencing–one month here, one month there, one week over there…

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