My sunflower

Our country director, Jeffrey, is amazing. He's just an all-around cool, smart, kind and charismatic guy. During the COS conference gave us good advice about our upcoming readjustment to life in the States. One of the goals of PC is to help educate other Americans about another culture and so, as he explained, our PC service only continues as we return home.

Many years ago Jeffrey was a PC volunteer (in Tanzania) and he told us about one particular experience he had visiting an American elementary school classroom to tell students about his time in Tanzania--post PC service. Like most volunteers, he has some great, interesting, wacky stories that make us laugh, cringe, and say "No way!" Sometimes these stories are at the expense of the volunteer and other times they illuminate the strangest or craziest things (in an American or Western viewpoint) about the culture in which we are immersed. During this particular trip to the elementary school he shared some of his "best stories" with the students and after a while he was pulled aside by the teacher who told him that his stories--as entertaining as they might be--were not appropriate for the elementary school setting and in her view they encouraged stereotyping the Tanzanians. Jeffrey said that he felt like a fool because she was right and that he then realized he needed to change the way that he presented his experiences working in Tanzania.

In order to better illustrate his point to me and my M23 colleagues, he drew a large sunflower on poster-board and on the outside of the flower wrote "Your Moldova" and on the inside of the flower drew many scattered + and - signs. These + and - signs represent the positive and negative experiences we have had working here in Moldova. He then arbitrarily drew a small circle inside of the flower encasing a handful of + and - signs. This was what he had been sharing with the young American children. Next, he drew another small circle that also encased a handful of signs, but the signs were selectively +.

I found this illustration to be extremely well-put and meaningful. When I return to America this July it will be after having lived in Moldova for over 2 years, comprehending and speaking the native language well. In 2 years, there are many, many impressions to make of one's surroundings. The impressions I have made--or that have been made upon me--by my experiences in Moldova have been controlled or created by so many varied facets of life including culture, language, people whom I have met, people with whom I have lived and worked. I have some "wacky", maybe "far-out" stories myself that are very, very entertaining, but it's important to always keep cultural sensitivity at the forefront of my mind. Even if I had terrible experiences with particular individuals, or mostly thought a particular value or belief to be "crazy", it's important for me to remember that these "stories" I share are leaving out 99.9999% of the other emotions, encounters, people, experiences that I had in these 760+ Moldovan days. It might be easy for me to pick out these funny stories for a laugh because they mostly do NOT color my OWN views of Moldova and the Moldovan people, but, for someone who has never lived in Moldova, never lived in Eastern Europe, or possibly never taken a vacation out of the USA... these entertaining and often insignificant memories I share can color a different picture that promotes stereotyping non-western people as ... a myriad of unpleasant things.

Lessons learned: do not censor what I share, just try to pull out and share the positives from the otherwise "grab-bag" of good and bad occurrences that inevitably happen over 2 years of living your life anywhere in the world.