Assimilation

Before leaving for Staging, I remember reading in one of my many Peace Corps highly informative manuals that there are stages of assimilation. The first being the “honeymoon” phase, wherein the individual (in this case, the American) is thriving on the excitement of a new place, new scenery, ideas, culture, language, what have you. The following stages are less pleasant—akin to a grieving process, but in this case involving criticism towards the culture, the people, the language, and removing oneself from these uncomfortable spaces. Eventually, so I hear, one gets to an emotional space in which she can accept and comfortably participate in the culture, but naturally, this takes time. It’s interesting to watch this play out with other volunteers, myself included. An experience when you realize “oh, so they WEREN’T lying to me when warning me about this.” 

In Ukraine, however, it seems that the length and weight of this commitment is beginning to dawn on some of my peers, and I see it in some of their faces. Peace Corps Training is, I think more than anything else, an effort to illuminate for us the reality of our situation, or as my Ukrainian teacher told me, “Yoo har nat een Kanzas an-e-moar.”

Today I heard it about the public restrooms. One trainee emphatically told me that she couldn't understand their "unpleasant condition," so to speak. To which I responded (and perhaps too sharply), “Well, we don’t have to understand it,” followed by my best Popeye impression “Eye yam what eye yam.” This, of course, had me thinking. And it’s something so simple, but this realization can only come with a particular kind of experience: The notion of “civilized society” is so troubled. It’s troubled because we’ve constructed it from familiar notions of “correctness” and “superiority,” which naturally implies inferiority. It’s something we talk about academically from our cushy cultural discussions, but its performance is very real. It’s real when you find yourself whining over a squat toilet. It’s real when you become flustered at the grocery store because they only have overpriced instant coffee. And it’s troubled because we assume that because it doesn’t make sense, then it must be bad. I’ve dealt with this when teaching writing courses, and I see students operate under the logic of, “My experience does not allow me to understand or relate to this text, therefore the author must be a terrible writer.” It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing because the onlooker (i.e. the American) does not have the frame of reference, the socio-historical, the cultural, the psychological, the ideological contexts to even have a discussion about toilets and lavatory behaviors. The cultural iceberg metaphor rings true. Under that toilet, the marshrutka that looks like it rolled out of a Cold War time machine, that cashier who snaps at you because you don’t have the right change, there is a foundation that extends far beyond our field of vision, and contributing to this is a Curtain (if you will) of thought that is far longer than we wish to acknowledge. And its opening does and should take time.