its exactly how i had pictured it: hot, humid and muggy with a million bright and vibrant colors; chaos and disorder on the streets with more zemidjans (moto taxi) than cars; woman in knee-length skirts, men with button-down short sleeve shirts; mosquitos waiting to attack; smuggled nigerian gasoline sold on street corners in glass jugs; the sexy sound of french being spoken everywhere and even some indistinguishable tribal languages...
however...well, that's exactly it...however...i don't know how to explain the feelings i have...i never experienced this when i arrived in ukraine...i have insight on so many things about what it takes to be a peace corps volunteer and yet i know nothing...at the moment i'm having culture shock...i've only been here one week...its crazy but its true...and i realized today why...
for several days i had been alittle stressed...french for one thing is not as easy as i had thought...while almost every language that i have studied had been a phonetical language, french is not...being a visual learner, french has proven to be a challenge...just the other day i was immediately frustrated during our french lesson...this happened to me week five of PST in ukraine...not week one...
what also hasn't helped is the fact that the pc staff here prefers to speak in french all the time, even during our technical and corss cultural sessions...even though i've been studying french for about 2 weeks, my knowledge of the language is practically nonexistent...its not their fault most PCVs have had several years of formal teaching in french, not to mention french is their first language...good thing i already know how to wash my clothes in a bucket, live with power outages and squat in a latrine without wetting myself or i'd be really screwed...
just the other day was the first day out of my comfort zone (ie: the street where i live, the route to school and the route to songhai)...that was a great day... children ran after me and yelled "yovo" as i rode by, when i say hello to strangers, they actually say hello right back (that could be the product of my "yovoness")...however i realized the extent of my ignorance with the beninese culture...life here is going to be nothing like my life in ukraine...
things are just very different...i stress on the word "very" here...yes, its is everything i imagined and more but there is an underlying thing which is preventing me from truly enjoying this experience...it has dawned on me...i'm going through culture shock...after 2 years 3 months and 2 weeks i was so accustomed to ukraine that i'm freaking out here in benin...culture shock for most people starts around the second or third month...well, i've been out of ukraine since june 1st and i'm starting to see what it means to readjust to your culture...but i'm not in my culture...i'm starting from zero all over again...no matter...i'll get through this...if i can do ukraine, i can do anything...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment