Coping with Culture

In any semi long-term international/cross-cultural stay, it is common to experience phases where your mood and mindset changes. It’s very much linked to where you are in relation to how long it’s been since you arrived in country, and how long it’ll be before you leave for home. For some people, these phases can be little more than passing moods, for others it can play out to the extremes.

I’ve always found myself experiencing these phases as well. For me, they typically play out in subtle ways, but they are certainly there. On this most recent trip, my initial ‘low phase’ occurred over Christmas break. Not feeling too settled socially, feeling unproductive as a staffmember of LEAD, missing folks back home, and still not understanding so much about Liberian culture, I became edgy and found any daily activity outside of the safety of my gated apartment complex to be a difficult one.

My coping method for this phase has always been to become deeply analytical. I try to address everything that I’m going through, and then rationalize why I was feeling that way. After drafting part of this around that time, I decided to hold off on posting it, at least until I could feel comfortable sending it under a more stable mindset. So when I found a rough version of this post stranded on my desktop a few weeks ago, I figured it was time to give it another shot. Its always a trick situation when you are analyzing an entire population's culture, but I'll try to tread carefully, but honestly and I only hope this will give you some idea of my thought processes.

The very first thing I had to keep reminding myself was this: Liberia is not a ‘developing country’; it, like a number of other African countries like Sierra Leone, Rwanda, DRC, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Angola (the list goes on) are ‘post-conflict’ countries. This means that these countries have most or all of the challenges facing developing countries, as well as an entirely different set of issues to be addressed that come as a result of having recently emerged from armed conflict.

My first thoughts went back to 10th grade ‘Challenge and Change in Society’, taught by Mr. Roukema. If I remember anything from the class, it was the time we spent learning about Abraham Maslow and his ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. If you're not familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, he basically says that humans meet their needs in the order of priority going from greatest to least immediately important. He breaks up humans’ needs into five categories (physiological needs, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization) and says that while humans need to experience all five levels in order to fully express themselves, they will naturally chose the first fulfill those most important for their continued existence first.

This is an interesting concept once applied to Liberia. Imagine an entire country where, for 25 years during the political instability, the top three (love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization) were largely inaccessible because of the incredible difficulty getting the first two (physiological needs, safety). Keeping this in mind has allowed me to gain a little bit of understanding when it comes to certain Liberian cultural behaviors.

This turned out to be quite a long post once I figured it out. So I’ll let you chew on that for a day or two while I figure out my thoughts for parts 2 and 3.