Staff Blog

Mentoring in Swaziland

These days I’m grappling with culture. Not the shock of it, I’m over the worst of that, but it’s pervasiveness and strength. I’m aware here of how culture is present and relevant in everything we do. It’s guides us through our lives, telling us how to navigate social interactions and understand what’s happening around us.  When we are in our own culture it helps us to make sense of everything. But we bring our own culture with us when we enter another.  We use it to try and interpret things in our new environment the way we do at home.  Let me tell you, this doesn’t always work too well. 

Since I’ve been in Swaziland I think this has been most apparent and I’ve been most challenged by this in professional interactions, especially when I’m in involved in trying to organize or problem solve something.  Time and again I’ve entered a conversation of this type feeling calm, cool and completely confident in what I was saying, and left feeling flustered, frustrated and totally confused about what just happened and how it was so different from what I expected.  In the midst of it I feel like a fly caught in a web, where the more I struggle to make things better the more stuck I get; everything I do to try and make things clearer or more straightforward seems to make the situation muddier and more complicated.

In our culture we’re rewarded for being proactive and organized.  We value openness and clarity and solution-oriented problem solving.  Here those qualities haven’t gotten me far.  Most of the time I feel like problem solving conversations don’t resolve anything and responsiblity is deferred from one person to the next.  Either I end up making a decision about something (when I’d like to be reach a decision together) or things are resolved without me being involved (even when I’m think it’s appropriate that I am).

Neither my way nor their way is right or wrong, it’s just different, and when we come up against each other I think it’s challenging for everyone. I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I just don’t know how to feel heard or to understand what is needed of me. I don’t know how to meet on common ground.  I realize that I have absolutely no idea how things get done and no basis upon which to predict what’s going to happen either in an interaction or a situation. 

But things do get done, and I recognize that I’m the one that’s choosing to be in their culture, so I’ve changed strategies. I’ve completely let go of control, not only in situations like the ones I’ve been talking about, but with everything.  I’ve stopped trying to understand.  I’ve stopped asking questions, I’ve stopped trying to asstertain what’s going to happen when and how it’s going to happen, I’ve stopped trying to think ahead or “make things easier” by trying to plan or coordinate.  I make sure I have my book, my computer and some snacks with me all the time, and I keep myself busy until someone tells me to go here or do that.  When conflicts come up I’m trying to keep a low profile and let others direct what should happen. I’ll admit that I do have moments I’m resistant to the direction I’m being given, or frustrated about the amount of time spent waiting or doing nothing, but it’s actually been easier than I expected to let go.

Although this is working very well for me right now, I have to admit that this complete lack of understanding scares me.  It scares me because I just can’t see how it is overcome.  It’s so easy in these situations to feel like “I’m right and she’s wrong” or perhaps even worse, “I’m right and she’s a complete idiot for not being able to see or do it my way.”  And it’s so easy for one cultural position to dominate over the other.  But is it possible for each party to give a little, in order to be able to meet halfway?  How much much time does it take to even be able to figure out how to give in appropriate and meaningful ways?  And after the knowledge of how to communicate is there, there has to be intention on both sides to try to make it work.  It all sounds pretty daunting to me.

I feel incredibly grateful to be at L’Arche for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that I get to live and work with people from other cultures.  I find it incredibly enriching, and enjoy having a sense that in a teeny tiny way I’m travelling the world while staying in my own home.  I appreciate not only learning about other cultures but also having oppurtunities to identify my own culture.  Living together and working across cultures keeps things interesting, and of course, isn’t without it’s many challenges.  As frustrating as those challenges can be, I’ve generally felt like I negotiated them pretty well, and felt pretty good about how issues get resolved. 

Since I’ve been here I’ve come to appreciate that although I’m living with people of different cultures and negotiating our differences in L’Arche, I’m on my turf.  I now see that I’m generally happy with how things get resolved because my perspective is being reinforced from all sides, and everything is taking place in a context that makes sense to me.  Where I’m not being reinforced, at least for the most part I’m being understood by others around me because we share a common culture. What I’m with here is how it must be for the other person, the person from a different culture. The context is not familiar,  and their view or approach is often not understood, let alone being reinforced by others in the environment. I’m not sure what about me will change when I go home, but I’m at least glad to have an awareness of this.

Another aspect of culture that I’ve been thinking a lot about it how it influences how we connect with other people.  This is apparent to me here in two different ways, which are both different sides of the same issue. First of all, and most obviously, it’s challenging to make connections across culture. Of course, I find it incredibly challenging to make connections with people in Canada, but here I find even harder to find a common ground because I’m not quite sure what ground the other person is standing on.  I don’t know what people’s lives are like so I find it difficult to find ways to engage. I don’t know what questions to ask to stimulate conversation, especially because I don’t know what is culturally appropriate or might be offensive.  People make jokes here that I don’t find funny or just don’t get. I’m afraid to make jokes for exactly the same reason.  It’s all hard.

The other side of this is that from the moment you make eye contact with a white person here there is an immediate bond. If I meet a Canadian, an American, or even a European and we start talking, we know what questions to ask each other, we have similar interpretations of our experiences in this foreign place and can instantly relate with ease.  I think culture transcends personality in these interactions, because someone who I might never be drawn to in Canada suddenly becomes more familiar to me in five minutes than Swazi’s I’ve lived or worked with for six weeks.

We encountered an interesting example of this last week.  SWAPOL is working with a consultant to design and carry out a study on the subject of women’s sexual and reproductive health right’s in Swaziland.  Turns out the consultant is a New Yorker who’s lived in Jo’burg for the last eleven years.  While she waited for the meeting to resume after lunch, Ryan, Kim, and I sat in the board room for an hour and picked her brains.  How did she come to be in South Africa? Why did she stay? How did she deal with the constant attention that comes with being a white person in Africa?  What was it like being a white person in post-apartheid South Africa, in particular? What does she miss about North America? What does she love about South Africa?  We asked questions and sat riveted by her responses. I was disappointed when the meeting finally started and our time was up, as I could have sat there for days asking her questions and listening to her responses. Why?  I’m around Swazi’s all !
the time who’ve lived here their whole life. Why her?  Because she has a very similar cultural background to ours.  When we ask her questions she understands what we are asking and gives us an interpretation that we can relate to.  I found affirmation and insight into my own experience because I was able to identify with hers.  The interaction was was fascinating and enlightening.

Interestingly, I think even with white Swazis there is some element of common ground that is harder to find than with black Swazis. I was having dinner in a restaurant in Manzini a couple weeks ago, and at the next table was a white couple with their two young children.  Turns out both the husband and wife were born and raised in Swaziland.  They asked me lots of questions about myself and told me some things about their own lives.  Now, they were both pretty intoxicated, which had some bearing on how the converstion went, but in the end I was intrigued by the relative ease of conversation. There was some way that they understood me and knew how to connect with me more than almost anyone that I’ve met here. Although I have some ideas about the reason for this, mostly related to history and financial resources, I would have been fascinated to spend more time with them (when they were not half in the bag) to try to find out more what there lives were like and why this was the !
case. 

Although shared culture facilitates connection, of course cultural differences can be penetrated.  With the right people sometimes you find that while the difference remains, the connection can both transcend and enrich it.  My first experience of that in Swaziland was with a woman I met a couple of weeks ago.  We were first introduced to each other by my host mother. She is a member of the SWAPOL support group in my area and works a plot in the community garden the group has, which is where we met. A week later our Intercordia group was spending the day at a place called Hope House, where we had been invited to help do some cleaning and spend time with the patients.  When we arrived we joined a a group of students who were doing the same thing that day as a part of their course to be HIV/AIDS counsellors.  Much to our surprise, the woman I’d met in the garden and I were assigned to the same job, and we spent the next four hours talking, asking each other questions, sharing !
stories and laughing. 

I can’t explain in, but there is some way that we get each other although we’re incredibly different.  Beyond that I’m a white Canadian and she is a black Swazi, she talks more than anyone I’ve ever met and has had more horrendous life experiences than I can fathom.  She’s 24 and lives with nine members (give or take) of her extended family.  Collectively they live on less than $80 a month.  Her father died last year but had essentially abandoned the family already several years ago when he’d taken another wife and moved in with her (Swaziland is a polygamous culture).  The one good thing about him, she said, was that he always paid for his children’s school fees.  But that didn’t mean he paid for food. She has a four year old son who she sees a few times a year for a few weeks at a time because his father’s parents want to keep him (children are the property of their father’s here, and women don’t have a choice).  She wants to be a nurse but has no money for the schooling, !
so she’s doing the HIV/AIDS training course.  However, jobs are so hard to find here she doesn’t expect that the course will help her to find employment. In April she found out that a class at a nearby school didn’t have a teacher (it’s a government school, and sometimes teachers leave and aren’t replaced), so she went to the headmaster to ask if she could teach the class.  She’s been teaching there five days a week since then and doesn’t get paid a cent.  On Friday the headmaster told her and two other temporary teachers (who she just then realized were being paid) that the goverment was sending replacements and so she would be losing her “job.” 

These are just a few of the things that I’ve learned about her so far. And each time we talk she tells me more. Every time I find myself trying to keep up with the stories that pour out of her. I’m not quite sure how to hold it all, let alone know how to respond.  Anyway, I’m incredibly grateful for her.  It makes all the difference in the world to have someone here who I feel I can really call a friend, who can look at me in certain moments and seem to know what I’m thinking. I’m glad I have someone now who I really look forward to spending time with, to laughing with and sharing with.

I’m not sure how to sum this up other than to say that I’m learning. I’m learning a lot about myself and about other people, about Swazi culture and my own, about poverty and luxury, justice and injustice. The worst of the culture shock is over, however I’d be lying if I said this experience was easy.  But maybe that’s good, and I suppose in some ways that’s why we’re here. I know deep down that what I’m living here is much bigger than these three months, and I’ll come home a different Lauren, I hope a better Lauren, than when I left.  In exactly what ways I’ll be different remain to be seen, but whatever they are, I’m grateful that this experience is leading me to them. 

-Lauren Nagler