Cultural Immersion
A WorldTeach volunteer finds that her richest experiences come from living with host families.
Article and photos by Molly Beer
In Spain it is impolite to put your left hand in your lap while you eat. In India, however, you must put your left hand in your lap while you eat. In Tibet it is your feet you have to worry about; you must not point the soles of your feet at anyone or anyone’s shrine, as feet are the lowest part of the body and placing
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| Tibetan children learn origami at a student camp just outside of the author’s village. |
anything but the dirt below those feet is blasphemous in a culture that values humility.
In short, everything from eye contact to posture speaks to people of all cultures, but the meanings change. Within those varied meanings lie a thousand potential conflicts or miscommunications. Language itself comes after body language and behavior in intercultural communication.
Living in another country is challenging, but living in another culture is exponentially more so. And yes, it is possible to be in a country without being in the culture. If cultural immersion appeals to you, living with a host family is a crash course.
Living with host families is infinitely less romantic than the alternatives. I still daydream about my apartment in Florence, Italy, decorated with candles and Chianti bottles stuffed with roses, or the funky fourth floor flat in Pontevedra, Spain that I shared, along with a passion for homemade music and food, with classmates from New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. And then there was my little house draped with bougainvillea in the imported teachers’ compound in El Salvador, where my boyfriend and I grew orchids in our lime tree.
These experiences all brought me joy, but I regretted not being more immersed in the culture of those countries. I had plenty of friends each time, but they were foreigners like me, or, if they were from the country in question, they were familiar with or interested in my culture—we spoke English, we sang American songs, we went out dancing until all hours of the night, and made a spectacle of ourselves in ways we did not even realize.
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| Children are often the key to making meaningful contact while studying abroad. |
My richest experiences living abroad, however, have been while living with host families. It is in a home—committing blunders and faux pas with our feet or our hands or our unintentionally blasphemous mouths—that we learn social rules.
It can be an intimate experience. I once shared a one-room house with a Tibetan host family in India. They were young newlyweds, married the Saturday before I moved in. I have never been happier to own a Walkman, but it made me think about sexual propriety in most of the world, where houses have no master bedroom, or even a bedroom that is not the living room.
More recently I lived with a host family in Ecuador in which the daughters, both twenty-somethings like me, were not allowed out of the house except to go to class. They petitioned their mother to let them take a day trip with their friends, but she never conceded. They never asked their father. I, on the other hand, was used to traveling every weekend with my boyfriend. During the week when I was in town, however, my boyfriend and I strove to fit into their social norms: he would come in the evening and watch TV with my host father while my host mother batted her eyelashes at him and tried to feed him as much as he’d let her get away with. Then we would play Scrabble in the living room until it was late and he went home. In this way we developed a close friendship with my host family and a fluency operating within their cultural parameters. Sure, I didn’t agree with my host sisters being confined to the house any more than I agreed with my host father sitting down to watch TV when he and his wife got home from work while she began her evening job of cooking dinner and cleaning the house. But I wasn’t there to judge or change anyone. I was there to learn.
Not only does living with a host family offer intensive lessons in culture and language, it also provides a safe place in the midst of a foreign world and culture. Having a host family can get you out of trouble in emergencies. For example, I had to call my Ecuadorian host father to pick me up in town well after midnight because the taxis were on strike. I was so embarrassed, but so relieved, when he arrived to rescue me from a long walk through dangerous dark streets. Host families are also a wealth of local information: somehow my family always knew ahead of time when strikes or demonstrations would take place, they knew which unmarked bus I should take, and what days we should all wear scarves to protect against the volcano ash in the air.
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| Molly’s 21-year-old host mother. |
Of course, it’s unlikely that a host family will match your personality 100 percent. It takes careful work on the part of the program assigning the matches, a good dose of luck, and a whole lot of effort on the part of both the hosts and the hosted. Host families open their homes up to complete strangers—foreigners, no less! Sure, host families often benefit financially by hosting, but it takes a lot of work and tolerance to care for us, their bumbling, exotic new pets. We deem their finest traditional dishes unpalatable, innocently say things with obscene connotations at the dinner table, and then inadvertently point a foot at their Buddha.
If you have real problems, you might have to move, although moving can be difficult. I have yet to convince my friend, who has contracted scabies a half a dozen times in as many months, that she should find a new home. She doesn’t want to offend her host family. But at the same time, don’t judge too quickly; often the most unlikely host families wind up being the most rewarding. Try your best to be open and the experience will pry you open further; just don’t set too many expectations ahead of time.
If you can communicate, ask questions. But more importantly, listen, and whether or not you understand, watch. Children learn this way, and when we are thrown back into the role of being a child, we should begin as we began the first time. If you are observant, you can sometimes see what you are doing differently from those around you. For example, while being driven home for the first time by my young Tibetan host on his motorcycle—it was the first time I had ever ridden one—I looked around me at all of the women wearing skirts and wondered how they rode a motorcycle. It was then I realized I had thrown my leg over the seat like a man—not ever imagining that my poor host father, who sat in front of me, was absolutely mortified. When we arrived I apologized and he turned all different shades of red. But in the end we laughed, and basically, that’s all you can do.
Molly Beer holds a BA from Duke University and has just completed her MA at Middlebury College. Her international experiences include SIT’s Tibetan Studies Program, teaching in El Salvador, and volunteering with WorldTeach in Ecuador.