Tag Archives: reverse reverse culture shock

Hope for Current Events

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Every time I get a chance to read about how my passport country is doing, it is difficult to digest. Division seems to rule the day. One friend genuinely fears for her safety as a young single mother of two, afraid to walk her city. Another friend is marching across the landscape with her children, trying to be heard – trying to ensure their future safety. Online, people post cheap shots in both directions and true listening is elusive. Last night on a main-stream news from Wisconsin, two men from opposing sides faced off on the street. In the clip, one man shouts, “I just want a real dialogue!” When his ‘enemy’ responds, he shouts over him. They both shout over each other. Neither hears the other. Neither is listening to the other.

My Scripture reading of the day included Zephaniah 3:


“What sorrow awaits rebellious, polluted Jerusalem, the city of violence and crime!
No one can tell it anything; it refuses all correction.
It does not trust in the LORD or draw near to it’s God.
Its leaders are like roaring lions hunting for their victims.
Its judges are like ravenous wolves at evening time, who by dawn have left no trace of their prey. Its prophets are arrogant liars seeking their own gain.
Its priests defile the Temple by disobeying God’s instructions.

But the LORD is still there in the city, and he does no wrong.

The remnant of Israel will do no wrong;
they will not tell lies or deceive one another.
They will eat and sleep in safety,
and no one will make them afraid.”

Whatever the current state of your city, whatever the current chaos in the media, whatever your level of fear, perceived or real… there is hope. The LORD is still there in the city. He is where you are. And He promises a time when we can eat and sleep in safety when no one will make us afraid. It may not happen right here, right now. We may have to wait for eternity for that much peace, but there is HOPE now because we have the LORD with us in the city.

In the meantime, I pray Zephaniah’s ancient words of Truth for the Church: that we would not tell each other lies, that we would not deceive one another, that we would obey God, humbly accepting correction.

Listening to one another.

1 Peter 4:8 “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”


In this song When It Was Over, Sara Groves sings this verse after a fight between husband and wife, but I think it can easily apply to any division in human relationships.

There is a Hope.

There is a Love.

Even in current events.

P.S. Some of you may remember how roses remind me of HOPE from a post in 2009.
Well, this week we planted our first roses in Cameroon!

Indeterminate Culture Shock

Cameroon Culture, Church, Family, Missiology, Texas Culture, Travels, , , , , ,
Back in the land of cheap, yummy avocados.…

I’ve written before about triviality, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about its application to our current times. That is, for missionaries and others working cross-culturally, there is always an element of adjusting to a new environment and culture. This includes how to find your bedroom light switch in the dark (if you’re moving house), but also how to not insult someone on the road, and how to not be insulted by someone else on the road —i.e., knowing when someones behavior should be offensive, and when it is just normal for your new environment.

But the kicker in all the above (and many other things to adjust to) is that knowing the new reality is only the first layer of adjustment. Being able to point to your light switch after thinking for ten seconds is not the same as being able to reach it intuitively —in the dark, and while still mostly asleep, when your brain is not really working yet. This is where the concept of triviality is helpful (to me, anyway!). Normal life has lots of trivial items in it: how to shop, how to make food, how to greet, how to get around town. There is some adjustment when these things change, but the goal is normally to move these things to a place were we just do them, without having to think through them each time/day.

So the twist that hit me this morning, is that whether we’re talking about culture shock, or reverse culture shock (or reverse reverse culture shock…), the transition is normally from one more or less stable environment to another more or less stable environment. The problem is that one house isn’t laid out the same as another house —but they’re both houses, and neither changes much over time. Similarly, moving from one culture/city to another requires adjusting from one status quo to another, but there is a status quo in each place, which doesn’t change much over time. But this is not what we find in 2020.

Rather, this year we have political and medical facts which seem to change on a regular basis. Then the recommendations, orders/laws, and rulings, which change in response to those facts (or not), then the implementation of those recommendations, orders/laws, and rulings on various levels, which must respond to all of the above. So the question “should I wear a mask right now?”, for instance, has been a non-trivial question for months, for many people. Are the CDC and WHO recommending masks right now, or not? What kind of masks, in what situations? What are the relevant recommendations, orders/laws, and rulings of our federal/national government? And of our state? Of our County? Of our City? And perhaps most frustrating of all, how do we respond when the neighboring nation/state/county/city says something different than ours? Or when the state says something that contradicts what the county says? Most of us are simply not accustomed to thinking through all these issues on any kind of regular basis, much less each time it might be appropriate to put on or take off a mask. And masks or not is not the only question (e.g., distancing, quarantine/isolation, and contact reporting), nor are on and off the only answers to that one question (e.g., public/online shaming, rebellion, political advocacy, and non-/violent public protests)

Now, if there were one set of rules imposed (for better or worse), this might just be a matter of adjusting to them, however much time, energy, and libery that takes. But when the info we’re basing a decision on changes every couple days (on some level), we have to re-evaluate, and the decision never has a chance to become trivial –so we continue to spend energy we shouldn’t on menial, daily tasks.

There is, of course one condition where this problem doesn’t apply. Namely, if your allegiance to a particular body medical/political/whatever is significantly strong to trump all others, then you make your decision once, and only change it when that one body changes advice —and hopefully that’s not often. But I have a hard time distinguishing that from bigotry, especially in the current political climate in the US. That is, if your response to the mask question is really just a badge of political affiliation (as I’ve heard from MANY people), then can you still say you’re wearing a mask (or not) because it is the right response to the pandemic?

I read twitter enough to know that for many people, there is only one correct answer to the mask question. But there seems to be a strong correlation between those people and the many who feel there is only one correct answer to the “which party should be in power” question, on both sides. And I, for one, have never felt fully comfortable voting for either party, as neither seems to represent me particularly well. So for me, my conscience dictates that I continue to reevaluate both questions, as new data comes in.

And I know there are many people out there that feel (at least a bit) the same. I’ve heard from many the difficulty of adjusting to constantly changing goal posts. And I think that this idea of having a culture shock (or lack of triviality) that has no real end in sight, is a large part of it. Even in this context, I feel obliged to continue to insist on my right and responsibility, as a human and as a Christian, to think, to use and develop my conscience, and to pray for the Holy Spirit to give guidance, and to follow that guidance even in the face of direction to do otherwise from lesser authorities:

But Peter and John answered [their rulers and elders and scribes, in council], “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

Acts 4:19-20 (ESV)

So where do we go from there? I think the bigotry answer, as flawed as it is, has something to it. That is, in the midst of a storm, hold one to one thing that doesn’t move. But I think we want to be careful to not make our one thing a human or human institution, which will all fail us, sooner or later. Rather, Jesus tells us

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

Matthew 7:24-25 (ESV)

So let us continue to read what Jesus had to say, and try to put it into practice, and let the storm flow around us as it will. Not that I think this will be easy, but I think it’s the only answer that doesn’t result in our eventual destruction.

Reverse Reverse Culture Shock

Anthropology, Cameroon Culture, , , , ,

We have now been back in Africa almost eight months, and in addition to organizing the physical necessities of our house (including receiving our sea freight shipment!), we have had a lot of personal adjustment to do.

Those who have lived cross-culturally are often surprised by what can be called reverse culture shock; it has been described relevant to a number of different domains:

The gist is that you expect culture shock when you go somewhere with a different culture, but you don’t expect culture shock when you come back. The fact that you have been living in another culture changes you, so you experience culture shock coming back to your passport country, but because you don’t expect it, it can be hard to deal with —you can have a hard time figuring out why it doesn’t feel like “home.”

Anyway, that all is stuff we’ve dealt with a number of times (like trying to buy peanut butter and jelly in Fred Meyer in 2000), and we’ve worked through it and come to expect it. But I think the best way to describe our current situation is that we’ve found another layer, which I’m calling “reverse reverse culture shock”. That is, when we returned from DR Congo in 2013, and blitzed through Oregon and California to move to Texas for my doctoral program, we knew we wouldn’t feel at home. As we got to know Texas, we got to know a lot of things, liking some more than others. :-) But however we felt, we had constant reminders that we weren’t from there, so we always had a framework to understand that nagging feeling of not belonging. Then last year, we were finally going back to Africa!

A lizard is a lizard is a lizard, but these aren’t the lizards we knew from DR Congo.…

Granted, we are not so naive as to think that all of Africa is the same. There is some 2,140 languages in Africa; this is a main reason we are here, after all!  Each one of those languages holds at least some cultural distinctives, however much similarity there might be between any two languages or cultures. Our first experience on African soil as Wycliffe missionaries was in Cameroon, where we currently live. But since then, our experience has been on the other side of the continent, in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) and DR Congo. DR Congo was an interesting counterpoint to the other countries we worked in because it has French as a national language. It also has laws and customs more common in ex-French colonies (as opposed to laws and customs in ex-British colonies, such as Kenya).

People overload vehicles almost everywhere we’ve been in Africa, but Yaoundé traffic is a new thing altogether

But whether the DR Congo distinguishes itself as an ex-Belgian colony, or for whatever other reason, it stands to reason that DR Congo and Cameroon are simply not the same country, so we shouldn’t expect them to be.

I never expected my daughter to play Volleyball at school in Africa

But there are so many things that you can generalize between them, like the love of soccer (OK, maybe that’s everyone but the USA :-)), beignets, and acronyms.

I’ve been thinking about this last one quite a bit in the last couple weeks, because of how differently Congolese and Cameroonians make acronyms. For instance, in DR Congo, each protestant church denomination is known by an acronym and a number. One group we worked with was called CECCA/16 (planted by WEC). The full name of the church is Communauté Evangélique du Christ au Cœur de l’Afrique (“evangelical community/church of Christ in the heart of Africa”), and it’s registration number with the DRC government is 16, hence the full common name with acronym/number. This is notably not the same group as CECA/20 (was planted by AIM), with full name Communauté Evangélique au Centre de l’Afrique (“evangelical community/church in the heart of Africa”). In each case, the longer/lexical words get one letter each in the acronym, and the smaller/grammatical words do not. The fact that CECA and CECCA are pronounced the same is ameliorated by the use of the government registration numbers, to keep their common names distinct.

But in Cameroon, there is often a different system in place. I don’t know that I’ve fully understood it, so I’ll just present some data. :-) The government ministry I visited last week is MINEDUB,  MINistère de l’EDUcation du Base (“Ministry/department of Basic/primary Education”). Here we have three letters from the first lexical word, three from the second, and one from the third (apparently avoiding MEB, MINEDUBAS, and MINEBAS). On the other hand, the Department of Secondary Education is MINESEC, MINistère des Enseignements SECondaires (“ministry/department of secondary teaching/education”), and the Department of Higher Education is MINESUP, MINistère de l’Enseignement SUPerieur (“ministry/department of higher education/teaching”). In these last two cases, we get three letters from the first and last lexical words, and one letter from the second word.

Lest anyone think I’m picking on government bodies (which I’m not, it was just three related bodies whose acronyms presented themselves), the linguistic conference that I attended last March is NASCAL, the NAtional Symposium on CAmeroonian Languages, with two letters from the first and third lexical word, and one from each of the other two.

And the denomination of our local church here is MEEC, Mission de l’Eglise Évangélique du Cameroun (“mission of the evangelical church of Cameroon”), which, while having an acronym I might expect, appears to be unrelated to the EEC, l’Eglise Évangélique du Cameroun (“the evangelical church of Cameroon”). I never thought I would miss those helpful numbers to disambiguate otherwise similar sounding names.

I’d never been to a US embassy auction before! (but I got priced out of everything we wanted by Africans willing to spend more.…)

Anyway, one of the major elements of cultural adjustment, we have found, is building triviality. There are lots of things we just don’t think about in our daily life, and that goes away when you’re having to think through every little thing as you interact with people who think differently in another culture. Funny how the way people build acronyms can differ, and cause you to have to think through something you never had to spend energy on before. I’ll try to do a few more posts on other ways I’ve found reverse reverse culture shock, readjusting to our life and work in Africa.

On our way to our first valentines dance in Africa

Here are a few other fun acronyms we’ve found around here:

  • ASOY — American School Of Yaoundé (presumably the fun of an acronym pronounced “a soy” trumped the rule against including grammatical words in an acronym. Or perhaps ASY had other problems.…)
  • RFIS — Rain Forest International School (despite the fact that RainForest is one word here, here, here, and here.)
  • CAMBO — CAMeroon Branch Orientation
  • STUCO — STUdent COuncil (at RFIS)
  • SCREAM — School Can Really Expand A Mind (RFIS reading program?!?)
  • FCFA – Franc Communauté Financière Africaine (the money everyone uses here and in a couple other countries, although no one seems to know what the letters stand for)