When I was preparing to serve in Nicaragua, I went through lots of training and tests that looked at how well I functioned in foreign settings and gave me advice in how to cope. On the adaptability test, I scored the highest in my group.
When I returned from Nicaragua, I attended a debriefing workshop. One exercise was to mash together yellow and blue play-doh to show how the country you served in had affected you. One color represented your home culture; the other color was the host culture. Mashed together, you could no longer completely separate them again. Most people's play-doh turned green, but not mine. Instead, believing that I was following the directions, I carefully mashed together my play-doh so that the yellow and blue were stuck together, but not mixed together. One side was yellow, the other side was blue, and only held up to the light could you see green. The workshop leader called me a chameleon, able to blend in wherever I am.
The fact that I am a European-American serving a Hispanic church makes this ministry technically cross-cultural. But I have spent enough time in Hispanic countries and studying Spanish cultures that the cross-cultural part isn't stressful to me.
Instead, what is the most cross-cultural, where I have the most trouble blending in, is the setting of this Hispanic church, which is rural.
I don't do rural. In any country. In rural places, I stand out. The smallest town I've ever lived in was Asheboro, NC in the early 1990s. In 2005, Asheboro reported 23,046 inhabitants. The city where I lived in Nicaragua in 2005 had 100,000 people. Unidos por Cristo is located in Grimesland, NC, whose 2009 population was 470.
Cross-cultural white American to Hispanic I can handle. But urban to rural is a whole other ball game.
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