A reverse cultural exchange

If we had no mirrors, we would depend on what others told us about ourselves and our self-identity would be reflected through someone else’s eyes.

When we look in the mirror we only notice what has changed from the last glance we took. As the small changes accumulate but go unnoticed it is easy to adopt the perspective that we are rather fixed, unchangeable, and just fine the way we are.

After spending some time in an indigenous culture in the Andean mountains, I soaked myself in that culture. There are many things about the indigenous village that I appreciated – its tranquility, the fresh food, the simplicity. After frequent visits there, the transition to returning to Canada became easier. Then someone from there visited me and stayed in my home to see how I lived.

There is cultural shock when you integrate yourself into another society’s culture, reverse culture shock when you return from another place to your own home, and then I could call it reflective shock when you transplant someone you know from another culture into yours.

There were quite a few curious moments to my friend’s visit. He lives his life thanking mother-nature for the life that he has and what she provides to support this life. She provides for this life through earth. He smiled and laughed curiously as he recognized how city folks have lost that perspective as we buy dirt in bags. “Where I live, we have earth by the km, not by bag” and you didn’t use to be able to put a dollar price on it.

There may be many health problems in low income countries such as where he lives. However, the routes of these problems lie in access to water (“the blood of mother nature”). My friend has dedicated his days to building a clean water system for his village with...

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...e a message to the Canadian indigenous leaders – “You are blessed with water in Canada, protect it for the rest of the world and for your children”.

I asked myself why I was struggling so much to find a way to help him and his people. Then I realized, I was struggling because he and particularly his family were the happiest and most fulfilled people I knew. This made it very difficult for me to help them, and made it obvious that they were trying to teach me about something very precious – how to live a happy life.

We live with so much around us that it seems hard to believe we can appreciate it all. We can throw things away and get something anew. It is also hard to look at yourself in the mirror and truly believe you can change the way you are. But looking at any old picture of yourself will attest that we all have the capacity to change in very large ways.