Culture shock...

First things first: no more virus. Sasser = matado. Which is good news.... sort of. I hate to admit it, but the virus kinda won. With the help of my computer friend, I ended up just starting over and erasing my hard drive. But, like I good boy scout, I came to Peru prepared for just such a situation. Before I left the states, I backed up everything on an external hard drive, and brought along all of the re-installation disks for my operating system, drivers, programs etc. And all the new documents I've created IN Peru since then, I've saved to my flash drive. So even though I had to erase everything to kill the virus, I had all of the important stuff backed up. And now all is back to normal. So we'll call it a draw. But now I have NOD32, so you won't be so lucky next time, Sasser...

* * * * * *

I've been in Peru for 11 weeks now, and so I thought I'd do a little reflecting on how things are going.

At this point in my work, I feel frustrated a lot of the time. Mainly frustrated with myself. See, I speak Spanish fairly well, and people frequently compliment me on how well I speak. Still, after living here for 2 and half months, the daily challenge of using a foreign language ALL the time has gotten to me. Sometimes when people talk to me, I just hear a blur. On the other end, I often just lack the vocabulary I need to express myself. It's REALLY frustrating not only to hear someone repeat something 3 times without understanding it, but even more so when YOU repeat yourself 3 or 4 times without being understood, even though you think you've explained whatever it is you're trying to say perfectly. My Spanish is getting better, but I really have to admit that I thought it would be a lot easier by this point.

I've also felt frustrated with my own ethnocentrism. I find myself blaming things that are different or "worse" than home on the Peruvian or Latin/South American culture. "They're just not as educated or advanced as we are." I would have told you you were crazy if you told me I'd find myself saying or thinking things like that before I left. Back before I came to Peru, when it was all just hypothetical, I always hated the typical "western = better, rest of world = inferior" worldview. I never understood it when I met people in the US who'd spent a lot of time traveling or living in another country, yet they seemed like the most snobbish Americans ever. I felt like this type of "ignorant" attitude in people who had NEVER in their lives left the US, (or the South, or Texas....) was easily forgivable and explainable, but to hear it from people who'd spent months or years traveling abroad just baffled me. But now, I'm kind of starting to understand how even these well-traveled and "cultured" people could sadly have the same type of mindset.

Back home, especially for white, upper-middle class university students, appreciating new perspectives and acknowledging the value of other cultures, peoples, worldviews etc is relatively easy, because it's all in THEORY. You're just doing it at 9:30 on a Monday, inside a modern, western university classroom, with other white, upper-middle class students and a white, upper-middle class professor. And after the 50 minute class period is over, you don't really have to think about it again until next Wednesday; meanwhile, you're going back to your dorm room to spend 4 hours surfing YouTube.

However, when you're living abroad in a culture where you don't speak fluently the language you need to survive, and when cyclical poverty, domestic violence, drug/alcohol abuse, gang activity and non-western thought processes actually become daily realities rather than bite-sized, easy-to-swallow textbook concepts, theory goes out the window. Life back home seems so simple, so easy, so FUN! in comparison.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Alex, aren't you supposed to be an 'expert' at this kind of stuff, Mr. Sociology gruaduate? Aren't their GLOBAL social processes at work?" And, YES, I know there are "global processes" going on far beyond the scope of what I see at a micro-level during my daily life in Comas. I FREQUENTLY find myself applying what I've learned in classes to what I see here in Peru. But at some point it all just becomes "blah blah blah, globalization, blah blah blah, free-trade, blah blah blah, the multi-national corporations, blah blah blah, neo-colonialism, blah blah blah, self-fulfilling prophecy, blah blah blah..."

And maybe the fact that I pretend to understand the macro-level socio-economic theoretical concepts (how's that for a string of fancy words that doesn't really say much?) just makes it worse. Because then it just makes me go back to the attitude of "I understand this situation, because I'm an enlightened Westerner, and the Peruvians don't." In conversations with people, I just find myself thinking "if only they understood, if only they thought like I think, things would be better." And I can't stand it when I find myself having these thoughts.

I could definitely go more into some of this, but I can't right now. I don't think living in Peru is turning me into a cultural imperialist or anything like that. I'm just frustrated, because I'm learning that I'm a little more prejudiced, ethnocentric and "ignorant" than I first thought.