Culture Shock

    Jones and I have spent one full day in Recife, Brazil. I am surprised at how quickly I have begun to experience what is referred to as culture shock. In reality I don't feel that it's shock, because I've been expecting it. I would prefer to refer to it as a cultural adjustment.
    Some may be surprised that I say I have been expecting it; after all, I did live in Brazil for two years, shouldn't I be pretty well accustomed to the culture? Well, yes and no. By the time I left Brazil after serving a mission for two years, I was very well adapted. In fact, I felt strange returning home and found some things were peculiar and unfamiliar in the United States. The fact is that we forget a lot of the small things that make a culture after a while. I have already forgotten some of the nuances of Brazil and am rediscovering them.
    The other factor to my cultural adjustment is that I am in a completely different region of the country where there are different nuances and the language is very different. S?o Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, is the center of most large businesses, and is the central immigration hub. Hence, the culture seems to lean towards sophistication and propriety. Recife, on the other hand, is closer to the agricultural portion of Brazil and is also a tourist city. Their language contains more slang, idiomatic expression, short, oft-repeated phrases of agreement or complaint. It is also higher in tone and has a much quicker pace. It really takes some getting used to. I would equate the difference to a Californian in New York.

    I have been thinking a lot about this cultural adjustment. My friend, Nephi, is doing a field study in India and has mentioned a lot of the same phenomena on his blog. (I highly recommend a visit to his blog. His entries are longer, but he does an incredible job of describing his experieces.) He has been experiencing many of the same things.
    After so much thinking, I have come up with somewhat of a hypothesis that describes what I feel is the cause of the adjustment, and it has a lot to do with the language. While in the U.S. I would confidently say that I am fluent in Portuguese. I would change that slightly now, and say that I was fluent in Portuguese and hope to be again very soon. I, again, am very self-effacing and require a lot to be satisfied with myself, but I have been struggling with the language. Most of it is the difference in the accent and the lack of practice over the past two and a half years.
    My tongue is ready, and my brain knows what I want to say, but whatever part of the cerebral cortex that deals with other languages is having trouble pushing the information through to the frontal lobe that deals with the motor control of the mouth. I find myself having to stop mid-sentence to find where I am again.
    The fact that I am unfamiliar with the accent has the greatest affect, in my opinion. I don't know if there is any scientific research that will back me up, but I'd like to explain a little theory that I have tentatively entitled "Stage Presence of the Mind" (or of the subconscious). It seems to me that our feeling of presence, recognizing what is around us, depends upon many small signals or triggers. After a while we become familiar with those signals and don't notice them. Take, for instance, the smell of your house. I remember that, when I was young, I would go into the house of my best friend and notice a particular smell. I once mentioned this to him, in my childhood innocence, that his house smelled different. He responded by telling me that I was wrong, it was my house that smelled different. Of course we were both right. Each house had a different smell, but we became oblivious to it after being exposed to it for so long. But we recognize immediately when there is a change. As soon as those common signals are changed, we become unfamiliar with our surroundings and lose that sense of presence and feeling of comfort.
    Other examples would be the sounds around our house or work place, the ringtone of the phone, the types of cars on the road, the language spoken around us, etc. I had never realized how many things there are until paying attention to the process of culture shock. Some of the signals that I had become used to in the US that are different here are the following:
?The cars in Brazil are small. It's very different to see small cars zipping back and forth across the road, or even driving straight down the line of two lanes.
?There are no plugs in the sinks. This really threw me off guard when I went to shave one morning. How was I to shave without a sink full of water?!
?The language. Try to pay attention to how many bits of information you acquire just by eavesdropping. Where you are, what time it is, where you're going, who the people you're with are, etc. etc. etc. Because I have to put forth an extra effort to understand the language, I miss all of this added information that is picked up passively.
    I think that it is this lack of familiarity that really gets to us. We have to be more alert and spend more energy to understand even just a little bit of what's going on. After a while it gets tiring and we just want to feel like we know what is going on, we want that comfort of being familiar with our surroundings.
    While discussing this with my companion tonight, I came up with another analogy. To put it simply, cultural adjustment is like dancing to the beat of a different drummer. You expect a certain rythm, and for a while it seems to be similar, but then there's a small change that throws you off. You just have to regain the rythm and keep going, but it gets to be tiresome after a while.

    Well, that's enough of my theorizing. I hope it makes at least a little bit of sense.