This semester, I got to go on the Ecuador Study-Service Term program, and I can’t think of a more important experience that I’ve had in my life. There is no way to understand the force with which those three months hit a person, so I won’t try to describe it all in 800 words. You’ll just have to take my word for it and hopefully try it yourself someday.
I spent the first half of that time in the capital city of Quito — as everybody does — then the second half in the small town of San Simón, roughly five to six hours south. For me, the real meat of SST happened during that second half. That was where I actually had to face down all kinds of difficult feelings and truly new experiences. I attended the funeral of my host dad’s dad; I taught at a school with fairly different ways of teaching, which I couldn’t help but see as “wrong”; I spent Saturdays doing hard work to help transport roof-building materials with my host family.Maybe the most valuable part of the entire program comes from moments of confrontation with something that is supposedly wrong according to past assumptions. Boy oh boy, are we good at thinking someone is doing something wrong. Teaching “wrong,” building “wrong” or even speaking “wrong.”
“Culture shock” is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit, and for good reason. It is very real. Being in a new place, it can be both hard and amazing to cope with all the new sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings. But for a lot of us who get that experience of passing three months with other families in a different country, the biggest culture shock is more of an internal realization — being shocked by our own culture that we had never had our attention drawn to before.
Almost every lesson was something that I knew in theory but had never had the time to be flooded with like I was during that time. First and foremost, I was forced into realizing more profoundly than I ever had before that I am the one with an accent. It’s a lesson in humility to see that I’m the one saying things funny, not the person who sounds funny to me.
I also came to realize that I was making a mountain of guesses about the importance of United States companies, entertainment and politics. No one had heard of any but the biggest companies; some of our movies were translated but most weren’t important; our politics certainly have an impact there, but concepts like state lines or our citizens’ rights are all but irrelevant. In one weekend, I shocked half a dozen separate people with the news that I came from a family of four kids. “But aren’t you only allowed to have two?” they would ask.
At the same time as the culture shocks were coming from every side, I came to look at my home through a new lens as well. In the early part of April, days before we boarded a plane to return, I found myself talking with my companions about the way we viewed different beliefs in Ecuador. Sitting in another hemisphere, we didn’t find it very hard to give grace to the people we met who thought completely opposite to how we did. “They have such different life experiences, we can’t blame them for walking away with different opinions,” we could easily say.
But we had the uncomfortable realization that we don’t have that same kind of grace for people who think differently in the United States. Pretty much any way you look at it, things are intense right now, whether it be political or cultural or anything else. “How could they have voted for the other guy? Can’t they see that it’s hurting someone I love? That it’s hurting me?” There’s probably hardly any of us who don’t think that way, and haven’t thought that way for years, as long as we’ve been old enough to even care what’s going on.
Having gotten even just the smallest glimpse into how big the world really is, it’s almost impossible not to be humbled — humbled by the fact that the person who voted for the other guy did that because of different life experience, too. It doesn’t actually take living three thousand miles away to live in a different world, nor to deserve empathy for it.
The last thing I expected from three months of not needing to think about American politics was to think about the subject more than I ever had before. Really though, politics are in no way the lesson. They’re just the product. The lesson — which I’ll admit is difficult to learn even having spent so much time getting hit with it — is that no one is the center of the story. For anything right or wrong any of us does, there will always be someone who sees it the other way around. Everyone is the one with an accent.
Josiah Miller is a sophomore math and secondary education major from a one road town called Cedar Springs in Michigan. He is part of the men’s cross country team and enjoys writing music in his free time.
