We have a love/hate thing with our sidewalk. To most people it's
just a normal sidewalk, but to us it's a long skinny barrier the divides
two very different worlds.
This is an extremely
unique setting in many ways, but one way is how suddenly the world as
you knew it changes over to something unfamiliar and occasionally
overwhelming. When people normally enter cultures so opposite to their
own, a car ride plus a long flight (or flights) plus another long car
ride usually provide some much needed time to turn one switch off and
another switch on. We have about a 2 second hump to drive across and
our parallel universe switch is now forced on.
On
the south side of the sidewalk lies the America that we all know and
love. Trust me when I say, we love America. We love that we can still
eat all of our favorite foods, shop at the grocery stores we are
familiar with, get anything that we want or need, order something online
and it arrives a few days later, receive regular mail, drive on roads
that don't make us crazy (relatively speaking), communicate clearly,
worship freely, visit all of our friends and family with relative ease,
see baseball games, get babysitters... on and on. We love that we can
go to the bank, the grocery store, Target and stop for food all in one
afternoon. Ya know, America! Easy, familiar, convenient and extremely
efficient.
And then there's the north side. This
world, where we spend much of our time, is completely opposite. I wish
by reading words you could imagine the feel of life here, but there's
much that is lost without actually seeing it, walking it, and yes,
smelling it :). My family is visiting for Thanksgiving and when my
parents pulled in to the complex my mom said very slowly, "It's like a
completely different world" as the sea of children parted ways in the
street to let the car pass. My sister sat on our patio and asked
question after question for almost a full hour. It takes a lot of time
to process just how different the world is on this side of the sidewalk.
It's not a complex with refugees, it's a refugee
complex. It's literally like another country. But instead of one
culture and language, there are 15 totally different cultures and
languages. As in other countries, accomplishing the small tasks of life
is ssss-lllll-oooooo-wwwww here. To go do laundry takes a long, long
time. Many times walking to throw the clothes in turns into an
invitation to have some tea or fruit in someone's home, and a 10 minute
trip turns into an entire afternoon... and the laundry hasn't even been
switched yet. All of life is that way here, any task outside of this
apartment needs to be multiplied by 26 to correctly estimate when that
task will be complete. Okay, maybe by 4 or 8, but you get the point.
As
culturally sensitive as I think I am, nothing spells "American" more
than being yanked out of a white middle-class suburban neighborhood and
dropped in the midst of a life that is slow, relational above all else,
slow, all things in common, slow, neighbors = family, slow, and you
always must be ready for company... and I mean always. There's no
structure, little convenience, and things like problem solving or being
proactive are foreign concepts. This, for an American, is enough to buy
a one-way ticket on a slow boat to China. Well truthfully that's only
the case a small percentage of the time. More often than not, I find
myself longing to be home in the village when I'm out and about being a
productive American. I love the security, the unspoken love, the
ability to feel warmth down in my heart just by looking at people smile
at us, the fact that my babies are learning that people are more
important than time or a checklist. There are beautiful qualities that
I'm jealous for and comforted by on the north side of the sidewalk.
We
would both agree that the hardest part of our new lives is that we have
to transition so quickly between worlds, that we have to constantly
turn our switch on and off depending on which side of the sidewalk we
are on. We do not have the luxury of being thousands of miles away from
home to detach completely from the comforts and mindset of America, we
must learn to adapt and function successfully in both. This is a tough
feat.
