Level 3

I've taken many steps on this runway by now

They say culture shock has 4 stages. First is the honeymoon phase, where everything is new and exciting and anything that is different from what you’re used to is considered novel. Stage two is where you find yourself getting frustrated with those differences, and realizing that you really do miss home and familiar things. If you stick it out long enough, you’ll work through the third stage of learning how to adapt and function and understand your host environment. Your network of community begins to grow and you begin to develop your everyday life routines. Finally one day you will find yourself realizing that you’ve crossed the long bridge from “I want to go home!” to “Hey, this is normal life.” They say this fourth and final "acceptance" stage doesn’t mean you’re an expert on your host culture, but you’re at the point where you are starting to become bicultural and are able to really start participating fully in your host culture. Life has taken on a normalcy and you feel a sense of belonging.

The Parts Room is much less lonely these days

That’s my spin on the four stages (and you can do a web search to read more descriptions of them). Lately I’ve been thinking about my own journey through these stages and it’s interesting to see how far I’ve come since landing in Papua a year and a quarter ago. I haven’t quite made it to the last stage in the progression, but I’m happy to have made it to where I’m at, as I continue to slowly learn the language and strengthen friendships. It hasn’t been easy getting this far, for sure. Just read my blog entry from a year ago, where I briefly showed a glimpse of what I was experiencing while in the midst of the second stage, which ironically had very little to do with culture. It’s been a one-of-a-kind learning curve.

But back to culture. Each month I jot down ideas that pop into my mind about what I could write about for this blog and this time I’ve just been remembering some of the amusing language and culture lessons I’ve learned over the past year. So let me share a few that come to mind.

First off is a Bahasa word that gave me a good deal of perplexity early on. It seemed that everyone liked to use the word “already” for everything. I would get on the back of a friend’s motorbike, and he would ask “Sudah? (Already?)”. I would finish eating and someone would ask, “Sudah?”. The person who borrowed a campus vehicle would announce in the WhatsApp group that the pickup had “already” returned. To my English-speaking mind, the word seemed to imply impatience or prematureness.

I finally made the connection that since this language doesn’t have tenses like English, the word "sudah" gives the sense of something having been accomplished rather than still being in the works. This little insight into the way of speaking has been helpful for me when it comes to understanding what my friends and colleagues say when we talk in English, as they tend to carry that mode of expression over from Bahasa. So when an office worker asks me “Did you already send me the document?” and it was only requested just a short while ago, they’re not trying to rush me. And likewise when someone says that they “already came back from town”, they’re not trying to say they came back early. They simply came back.

Another somewhat unique expression to me is the announcement that someone is going to “go first”. My housemate would tell me “I will go first,” when he was getting ready to head out the door to work. Again, to my English-speaker’s mind, associating the word “first” with “Me”, “Myself’, or “I” instantly sets off warning bells in my mind about lessons learned in childhood—it’s better to let others go first. But it has nothing to do with pushing to the front of the line or competing to see who will be first. The expression is simply the polite equivalent of the English way of saying, “I’m going ahead.” It’s just a way to let the other person know you’re heading out, and "dulu"—first—is really just a filler that reiterates the obvious, that you’re going ahead of them.

There are many such examples of how direct translation doesn’t always work out. Just as my Indonesian friends will use English words to say Bahasa phrases, I try to use Bahasa words to communicate English phrases and sometimes people just stare at me, trying to figure out what this bule is trying to say. Like when I learned the word for “when” and would try to use it try to talk about stuff that happened in the past. That usually injected confusion, and I eventually discovered it seems to be more a word to be used for asking about something that hasn’t happened yet and there was another word I needed to use. But, hey, it’s just all part of what makes learning a language intriguing and fun! And of course there are those hilarious language faux pas moments that everyone has. I haven’t had too many—yet. But at least one possible accident comes to mind, as I think I told a villager that I don’t drink cow’s milk but rather donkey milk. The word for soybean—kedelai—and donkey—keledai—are too awfully similar.

Getting ready to go on Staff Picnic in style!

So far, I’ve been finding the Indonesian culture to be welcoming and easy to adapt to. Some things I find amusing. Like how it’s considered essential to have a banner for any and every event that your organization or church is putting on—and if you put English words on it, the better. Or how an introduction of a new individual in staff morning worship is always followed up with a question as to the person’s status—are they single? Or some specifically Adventist ways of doing things that have developed in this local setting, like the MC picking a group of people on the spot to do the musical selection in church. “Today the song of praise will be given by…(picks something randomly out of his/her head)—all the men!” (or all the women, or all the singles, or all the fathers/mothers/young people, etc.).

I’m still learning the normal things to do in various social situations, like how you really can’t give too many handshakes. I’m accustomed to slipping into church unobtrusively, but I’m learning that it's not quite the way to arrive here. It’s important to greet those around you with a handshake and “Selamat Sabat” as you’re making your way to your seat, sometimes even if the Bible study discussion has already started. And then after church is finished, it’s pretty much a given that everyone will shake everyone else’s hands—even if you they already shook each other’s hand when they arrived.

Going from just faces to friends.

These are just a few snatches from what I’ve been learning. It’s hard to capture everything in one blog post, and I also have no idea how much more I have to learn during the rest of my journey here. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s good to be where I’m at and slowly, but steadily moving forward. Though a lot of the conversations still go over my head, I feel comfortable in a group of people talking Bahasa. It’s familiar now. I know how to get around and buy the various things I need and interact with some of the people I might encounter in the process. That’s familiar now. There are great people to work and worship with. They’re familiar now.

Christmastime in a place that never gets cold is familiar now too. As we wrap up the year in our respective corners of this tremendously diverse world, may our thoughts return to the One who took the greatest cultural leap when He was born that first Christmas day. I wish you all a truly Merry Christmas.