So I was having a conversation with one of my good friends here (another volunteer) a while back about dealing with the fact that we both live in extremely small rural sites in which we are the only foreigners. In both our cases this meant that we were quite literally one of the only people that anyone from our site had interacted with closely, and routinely, who came from a different culture and had different ideas and ways of doing things. Now as someone who has a lot of experience traveling the world, I am pretty used to encountering different ways of thinking, doing daily tasks, and preparing food. Due to this experience I am probably much more adept at adjusting to new surroundings and open to new ideas than many Americans (for example, in Taiwan I happily ate jelly fish and a kind of tofu called smelly dofu, which literally emits the smell of dog poop when it is being fried). Thus going into this experience I was confident that I would be able to adjust to the culture and food of my new home relatively rapidly (even though honestly it is pretty hard to imagine two places more different than Washington DC, the capital of the most developed country in the world, and La Fraternidad, one of the smallest backwoods municipalities in the smallest department in one of the least developed countries in the western hemisphere). I was also pretty confident that even though I am the first volunteer (or American in general for that matter) to live in the town, people would adjust to my presence and cultural differences over the first six months. But quite honestly, before settling into my village I had no idea how un-adept they would be at this.
Going into this experience, I could not have been prepared to how completely closed off rural Hondurans are to the possibility of any other way of thinking or doing anything in a different way. This inability to adjust their way of thinking or accept my way of doing things as a different but valid option truly baffled me at first. They were so closed off to new ways of approaching anything, that I came to realize that they viewed my actions and beliefs not just as different, but as wrong and many times as a sign that I was “mal educado” (basically that I had bad manners). This was very frustrating and at times somewhat offensive until I finally realized that they honestly did not know better.
This finally occurred to me when I was talking to my friend’s four year old son, and I didn’t understand a phrase and asked him to repeat it. He proceeded to shout it directly into my ear, assuming that I was just hard of hearing, because it was inconceivable that I didn’t understand Spanish perfectly (or even that I didn’t speak it exactly like everyone in town). When his father and I tried to explain that Spanish wasn’t my first language, he was truly dumbstruck that such people existed (he had heard me speak English on the phone and I think just thought I had learned it in school like everyone here, but was just a way better student).
While he was just a child, I realized that his behavior was actually indicative of a general trend. The vast majority of the people in my village have never traveled more than ten miles from home, and have never been exposed to different ways of thinking, talking or doing daily tasks. Thus they do not understand that there can be multiple ways of doing things in many cases. This lead to situations, like when my friends watched me make white rice by boiling it in water, as opposed to frying it in vegetable oil (actually how they make rice), it isn’t different, it’s wrong (This reaction was made more interesting by the fact that they were all men, and thus had literally never made rice before, but they knew I was doing it differently than their wives and mothers).
