Things That Go Without Being Said
In every culture, every society, there are things that go without being said. We don’t even realize those things exist, not really, because we don’t talk about them, we don’t even know we’re doing them, in our native culture. Yet, when we enter a new culture, a great part of what’s called “culture shock” is trying to navigate in a place where you know you don’t know the things that go without being said….and the things you expect without realizing you expect it, just aren’t there.
Today, as I was walking to the grocery store with one of the students, we both wondered out loud if we should, or could, tip the person who has been taking care of all the laundry, all the meals, all the arrangements, all the everything that has to do with the basics of living. We found out it is a grave insult, here, to tip. It is considered demeaning. Whoa, right? In the U.S., it would have been considered stingy, rude, and ungrateful to not tip. Culture shock. The things that go without being said.
Tip 2: Hard-boiled egg with salt, 2 anti-inflammatories, and 12 ounces of water with electrolytes for 5am breakfast. Truly. You will thank me
Taking in the whole experience may not seem to make sense at the time, like washing pottery day in and day out, when you do everything you can to avoid washing the dishes when your at home. Like going to dinner with everyone, every evening, rather than cut out to a restaurant or the beach, or hole up in your room with a book. But, it’s that very experience, all of it, which works its way into your mind and spirit, revealing not just the mysteries and material world of the ancient past, but truths about sharing that discovery as a community.
Huh. Might be a Bible verse in that! “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, NRSV)