i am living in a comfortable house. i am speaking English everywhere i go. i am eating familiar foods. i am in touch with family and friends at home.

so, how can i possibly be experiencing “culture shock”? and what IS culture shock, anyway?

i don’t have internet access, so i can’t quote what someone else might think culture shock is. instead, i can only relate my experiences and claim that my moods, my appetite, my motivation, my personality, and my reasons for being here have all been turned on their respective heads. i don’t feel like myself unless i am in a conversation with one of the girls from the UK. which is really confusing. “shocking”, even.

there is absolutely no doubt that the culture here in Zambia is very different from back home. there are very few occasions for me to draw similarities to Canada and i can’t “pretend” i am anywhere other than the middle of Africa. i am not visiting Europe. i am not visiting Australia. i am not even visiting Mexico or a tourist destination with hotel zones designed to buffer me from the “real” community culture. i am living in a real (albeit well-off) neighbourhood of an African city with slums and posh houses and children in dirty bare feet asking me for kwachas at the grocery store and 99.9% of the people i meet sharing a common skin colour — one much different than my own.

but what is it about a foreign culture that makes it shocking? and why are some people more affected than others?

some of the girls here at African Impact that arrived after i did seem to be settling in quite easily. most are young and came with a friend or two from the UK. most don’t seem to talk about the events here except to exclaim that “yah, it’s sad” or “did you see that??” or spend little time on their own and go out drinking a lot.

but some of the other girls appear quite moved. the look in their eyes is clouded over or blank, almost a defense mechanism against all the sadness and poverty we have seen. some have expressed to me that they feel their actions are futile, not enough, wishing we could do more somehow or somewhere. i can relate to them, but our individual states of “shock” each run so deep that we can’t climb out together. we can only acknowledge that someone else is going through the same thing we are and try to carry on independently.

i don’t know what makes someone more vulnerable to culture shock than another. i can only guess it must be a combination of empathy (or lack thereof) and adaptability. it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with travel experience, maturity, personality, or age. those with more empathy and less exposure to change seem to be affected to a greater degree. i suppose that makes me a prime candidate…

i have a lot* of travel experience under my belt, but grew up in an extremely stable home with a divorced-but-totally-stable family. i was not exposed to a lot of change and, as such, didn’t need to develop an ability to adapt to foreign environments. as a young introvert, i just avoided any situations that made me uncomfortable instead of challenging myself and growing. even though that obviously changed almost as soon as i moved away from home, the foundation was laid. i also have a high level of empathy with an unreliable “off” switch. i find it too easy to relate to what someone else is going through without protecting my own emotions. i can only imagine that it’s a combination of those two things that make it hard for me to “be myself” in an environment that is jolting me from all sides.

looking back on past trips, i used to think my unsettled longing while visiting foreign cultures was because i was lonely traveling independently. now i think i was emotionally lonely for someone who could relate to what i was going through, more than physically lonely for a good long hug. although either would do just fine right about now. : ))

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*well, maybe not a lot by today’s standards. people in my generation and younger seem to be traveling all the time.

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