NEWSCROSSCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

A picture that one of the women in our pilot classes drew. She described her life as a flower. Her childhood was bittersweet. She then went to school and started a family. In the future, she wants her three daughters to be married and happy, and she wishes to retire in a big house.

There was a period of time during the past five weeks when I found myself questioning more and more the reasons that I am in India and the real impact that I am having on the women and the organization that I am working with.

About three weeks ago, I had a long conversation about development work with an Indian American, who had decided to move to India to create his own nonprofit and who has been living here for the past eleven years. He viewed “development” as another form of imperialism and colonialism and saw the perceived need to “develop” other countries as stemming from the need to address problems that the West faces. I recommend the book The History of Development, which explains this line of reasoning in more detail, to those interested. Nevertheless, his basic argument was that the people living in “developing countries” have been self sufficient and living their own way of life for generations; most of the problems they are facing are caused by globalization and the imposition of outside systems on their way of life. Development exists to extend and perpetuate the Western capitalistic and liberal system onto the rest of the world.

This idea troubled me for a long time and made me extremely self-conscious. For a while, when conducting fieldwork, I could not help but feel like an intruder. Sitting on the straw mats that the women whom we visited reserved for guests, I felt invasive, armed with my pen and notebook and asking the women what their average income level was, whether and how much money they saved per month, what their level of education was. Most women would graciously bring out chai and crackers for us, and I realized that I probably would not be as hospitable if strangers came into my home and asked me such personal questions.

Obviously, I had been trained in “asset based community development” and had been taught to be sensitive to different cultural contexts, but I had never been so self-conscious of my own ignorance and inadequacy. Who was I, a twenty-year-old college student from the United States, to come into these women’s homes and presume that I could develop a curriculum to teach them how to better manage their money? I had never been to India prior to this trip, did not speak Hindi, and certainly could not learn enough about the culture in the seven weeks that I was here to create a truly culturally sensitive curriculum. Furthermore, these women didn’t ask for my help, and of all things, was financial literacy really something that they valued as a priority or was it something that me and the organization that I am working with had concluded, based on our own set of presumptions and values, that these women wanted and needed?

Because I had grown up in a different culture and would never be able to experience these women’s way of life in the way that they had, could I really create any program that wouldn’t be imposing my own “Western” values onto them?

The first reform that we created in Sahayata Livelihood’s financial literacy curriculum was a drawing exercise. One of the main goals of the original financial literacy curriculum is to make the women aware of their life cycle needs and to get them to create a financial plan and save for the future. We decided to get across this idea by having the women draw their lives as children, their lives now, and what they wanted their lives to look like in the future. When we first tested this exercise with a group of women, the women merely giggled and looked at us as if waiting for us to tell them that we were joking. Most of them were illiterate or else hadn’t held a pen in a long time and therefore felt uncomfortable using one.

We remained firm, but I felt patronizing, asking women who had more than ten to twenty years of life experience than me to draw pictures of their lives to envision their own life cycle. Furthermore, I had no idea whether this exercise would be useful to them at all. My partner Sahiba and I drew our own pictures to encourage everyone else to do the same. They eventually began drawing their own pictures, and we went around the circle and asked everyone to share their drawings with the group. Our pictures were eerily similar. In the future, we wanted our children to be happy. We wanted lots of grandchildren and a nice house to retire in. We wanted to be happy in old age.

The moment was incredibly touching to me, especially when I had been questioning the purpose and real impact of the work that I had been doing here. It was an amazing connection to feel when I realized that, despite all of our different life experiences and the fact that we grew up in such different cultures, what we wanted for our lives were the same.

In an effort to be politically correct and “culturally sensitive,” we often forget that on some level, we are all human and there are some things that we all value and cherish, regardless of culture. The problem with development and with critiques against development is the focus on “Western values” vs. “Eastern values,” “developed” vs. “underdeveloped.” If we strip away all these labels and see each other as simply fellow human beings, we begin to see that there are indeed ways that we can learn from each other and help each other, but all that starts with building friendship and understanding first.

There is often a romanticized culture around the notion that students can and should “change the world” and a recent movement towards college students establishing nonprofit organizations and doing volunteer work abroad. However, underlying all this is the presumption that something needs to and should be changed about the way these people live.

My primary reason for coming to India was to “engage in development work on the ground.” However, during these seven weeks, I have not been a student working in development or a student out to change the world. I am simply another human being, coming to learn about other ways of living and trying to connect with other fellow human beings in a meaningful way.

A few little kids in Nicaragua always used to bid us farewell at the end of the day with the parting words "hasta nunca" which translates to "see you never." Oddly enough, these children would say that even if we were going to see them the next morning, but at the end of my month there, "hasta nunca" took on a different meaning... I may not see these beautiful children again.

I still think about my students and friends - Armando and Ulises, Tatiana and Lester, Gabe, Fabre, and Adrianna - all the time. I see them in the pictures up on my bulliten board and in my memories of my summer. I hope that I will return to Nicaragua in the Spring to serve with an Orphan Network trip and perhaps steal away for a day or extend my trip to pay a visit to our beloved barrio (village) where Manna Project is located.

For me, going into the trip, I knew I was going to get to know these communities and then in a month's time have to say 'goodbye.' Allthewhile, knowing who was going to carryon our efforts and mission - the same community of volunteers that had been doing a superb job for nearly a year before us. However, this week marks the end of Manna Project's 13-month program. The 8 year-long volunteers will be packing up their belongings, donating their stuff, finishing up their lesson plans, and handing over the reigns to the new team of year-long volunteers. What a difficult position to be in!

Indeed, service always does a great service to the volunteer. In stepping out to live for others, we inevitably get taught a lesson, have our lives changed, and feel touched by beautiful and painful experiences.

I commend these Manna volunteers for their commitment to the communities of Cedro Gallan, Chikilistagua and La Chureca for the last thirteen months. They have gone from being a new kid on the block who hardly spoke Spanish and couldn't drive a stick shift car, to the most beloved gringos that some of these Nicas will ever know.

And now they will be replaced; replaced by amazing and bright new volunteers but still replaced. Will they be forgotten? Is that okay? After devoting so much of their life to these people, can another gringo with the same rubia (blond) hair just swing in and take their place?

I really dont know if the people will remember them after a number of years...for now, the new gringos will not be able to compare to their dear friends who are moving on. Nothing the new group does will meet the standard they set, until everything sets into place and the communities become adjusted to one another.

Manna Project provides a truly amazing opportunity for average Americans to step out of their world and into another, not just for a week or a month, but for over a year. Through that year, both the volunteers and the Nicaraguans they are serving will grow to be genuine friends and confidents and will learn important and substantial lessons from one another. And then, at the end of the year, things will change. The Americans will return home and the Nicaraguans will be introduced to their new friends. Is it okay to continually take and place strangers into these people's lives? Can we ask young Nicaraguan children who don't understand what love is because their father walked out on them when they were little and their mother beats them, to grow cross to an young American, and then in a year's time, they too will be gone?

I don't know what the best system is, so I do not ask these questions to point out a problem or propose solutions. I simply ask these questions in reflection and challenge of pursuing a continued life of service.

Could you give it all up? Would you go and never come back?

I am so thankful that there are people in this world who would answer yes to both of these questions without second guessing. (And I'm thankful for those that second guess, and go anyways!)

For me anyways, I hope it's not 'hasta nunca' to these people. I'll be back!

Marmots once dug their homes in deep holes across the Himalayan plateau, helping turn over the soil and creating the grassland's most important water reservoirs. Now, they are being hunted for their skins. Piles of rocks speckle the mountainsides where marmots scratched futilely against the solid rock in an attempt to escape their hunters. The grassland moisture is drying up. The plains are becoming desert.

Yesterday, I wrote that rats ("grass rats" in Chinese) had infected humans here in Qinghai with the black plague. That translation was incorrect. The vector species were marmots. Currently, it is believed that the disease took two routes of transmission: (1) street dogs eating a dead marmot and infecting goats who later died from the plague and infected the man who buried them and (2) fleas transmitted from marmots to humans during poaching activities.

China has long been known as the breeding ground for the worlds' most dangerous and widespread diseases. Each year, the US designs its flu vaccines based on new strains found in China.  Why?

One possible answer is that China has a high population of animals and humans living in close proximity to one another, often with minimal infrastructure to restrict cross-transmission of diseases.

The Chinese government and NGOs have pumped a lot of resources into improving rural infrastructure. They have installed running water projects, built clinics, manufactured solar cookers, and distributed thousands of improved stoves. Despite these admirable efforts, W. China's rates of death and illness due to water and airborne diseases remain some of the highest in the world (with unofficial numbers likely to be much much greater due to the shear difficulty of getting health care out to China's rural masses).

Perhaps the solution does not lie in infrastructure development alone. China needs doctors to staff its clinics and  public health professionals to design preventative medicine programs. It needs engineers and locals to work together to design pollution management systems which break the cycle of disease transmission and it needs scientists who can help prevent the ecosystem imbalances which have been associated with so many disease outbreaks including historical cases of the pneumonic and bubonic plagues.

Humans worldwide need to reconsider the basic way that we interact with our environment, reduce our environmental pollution, and create healthy living spaces for ourselves as well as the animals and plants upon which we depend.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

Some say that solar cookers and solar panels pull the sun down from the sky and that this can cause evil in the world. Others say that humans should use the sun, as plants do, to live and grow without polluting the sky gods’ kingdom with black smoke.

The SolSource 3-in-1 was born from this second desire. It harnesses the suns’ energy for cooking, heating, and electricity generation without pulling it from the sky.

The initial concept for the SolSource solar cooker platform was born out of a memory relayed by a Ladakhi nomad.

“The colors of our land are changing. The land was once a vast expanse of green grasses dotted with black tents. Now it is a desert of yellow and white.

When I was a child, we would move our black yak tents from place to place and only leave a small pile of white ashes on the ground where we had been. Now, my children think it is better to live in a white synthetic tent and leave the ground covered with yellow plastic. They think that everything from the outside is better than what we make even when it doesn’t work as well…like the synthetic tents that let in all the cold air and have to be replaced every two years.”

The Himalayan terrain is one of the harshest on Earth and its inhabitants have displayed incredible ingenuity in adapting to that environment, sheltered by their woven yak-hair tents which last for 20 years and whose fibers swell to keep out the rain.

The design of the SolSource Cooker through close collaboration among villagers, students, and development workers, is an attempt to continue a traditional line of local innovation. It merges design principles of traditional nomadic tents with those of synthetic high-altitude hiking tents to produce a light-weight, portable, and weather hardy solar concentrator that enables the maximum range of cooking styles including stir-frying.

Field tests have yielded 28% efficiency compared to 20% efficiency of butterfly cookers tested simultaneously. The most recent iteration of the SolSource solar cooker reduced its weight to 6 kg. Although staking down the bamboo legs gives the device excellent stability against the wind, many villagers thought that it was too light and were worried that it would not last long under windy conditions. We plan to revert to several elements of our previous prototype design which bring the weight of the device to 8 kg.

The other element that we changed during our recent tests was the design of our thermoelectric component. The feedback was that the previous prototype which was slightly less efficient but which allowed people to boil water while also generating electricity was highly preferred by villagers.

We have partnered with four communities to begin local manufacture and income generation of the SolSource 3-in-1 over the next year.

>Pictures are coming soon when I have a good internet connection...

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

When you need a solution for your organization, is it better to do it yourself or outsource it to another organization that is already doing it? When does the efficiency of partnership out weight the power of ownership to shape something specifically for your organization?

With the political situation still unsettled in Honduras, travel to communities has been hampered on days of protest to insure the safety of our staff. When work in the communities is put on hold, it means being flexible to take on new projects and to rearrange our schedules to continue making a difference while in the office. This week, I took on a side project of reviewing a list of organizations that work in Honduras to find possible avenues of collaboration and discover best practices that Global Brigades may also benefit from.

Many people criticize the non-profit industry for continuously re-creating the wheel by developing more organizations that do the same work, rather than working together. The health work that we do in Honduras is not an exception to this. As I was reviewing the list and studying the websites of each organization, I realized that there are many other organizations doing health work in Honduras. I found that many are doing the same work as Global Brigades, but even more so, organizations whose programs would compliment ours. I began to wonder why we weren’t already working with them.

During the two hour drive out to our pilot community health worker village today, I sat in the back of our pick-up truck, sharing my thoughts about NGO partnership with a recent graduate from UC Berkeley. Together, I as a business student and her as a pre-med student, we used our experiences in each area to brainstorm and discuss why it is that many organizations don’t collaborate, and more importantly how we, as Global Brigades, can do more to collaborate.

Our main take away was this: everyone in the field agrees that we’re all working together towards the same cause, yet there is a disagreement on how this should be done and want the power to be able to do it how they think is right. With the joy felt in helping others, many feel a sense of pride that their work is making a difference, and with that comes a crave for ownership to continue doing it their way. Sure, all organizations want to learn more about how they can increase their impact and help more, but most often, organizations want to do it themselves once they learn how.

During this conversation we came to agreement that we need more specialized physicians to come on Medical Brigades to provide specific treatments to the health problems plaguing our communities. All it would take is another volunteer to be dedicated to recruiting more doctors, surgeons, etc. because all of the logistics and infrastructure needed is already in place. But the real question is: do we do it ourselves or do we work with another NGO that already only recruits certified medical professionals for medical work in Honduras? How do you get two organizations with completely different models to work together for the same cause? How do you convince someone that you are a collaborator and not a competitor?

As a child, she tended yaks and goats on the mountainsides of rural Qinghai, China but things have changed since then. She still considers herself a nomad. Now, however, she is a nomad of business and it is solar panels and solar cookers she tends.

Dorma (卓玛) rose in the business world by migrating from trade to trade and from city to city; wherever opportunity presented itself. She is one of the few women of her ethnicity to run her own non-restaurant business.

One Earth Designs recently visited Dorma’s factory with local university students to negotiate solar technology prices. Seventy watt solar panels cost 2,000 RMB (293 USD) and 8 watt solar panels cost 400 RMB (58 USD).

As for solar cookers, China has a handful of standard designs that you can read about here. Dorma sells the two most popular designs:

(1) Concrete Butterfly Solar Cooker:

Butterfly solar cookers are asymmetric parabolas. In this solar cooker, the asymmetric parabolic dish is made from concrete. Small mirrors (usually 1”x 1”) are then pasted on the surface of the concrete parabola using tar or silicon adhesive. The base of the cooker is a circular concrete slab.

(2) Cast Iron Butterfly Solar Cooker

This is also an asymmetric parabolic solar cooker. The dish is made from two cast iron wings that unscrew for separate transportation. Mylar is pasted on the surface to boost specular reflectivity. Standard paper glue is used as the adhesive. The base is designed like a wheelbarrow in order to increase portability.

Although Dorma sells these cookers, she does not manufacture them. We went to visit solar cooker factories in Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai in order to compare prices and profit margins. Here, we report these values for the concrete solar cooker (only the government manufactures metal cookers as the unsubsidized cost of purchasing them is prohibitively expensive for most households).

The total price of manufacturing a concrete solar cooker averaged 84 RMB (12 USD). Profit margins for the factory owner ranged from 36 to 116 RMB (5-17 USD).

Many factory workers had recently relocated to urban centers from the countryside. Workers laying mirrors were able to make 6 cookers per day, thus earning 36 RMB (5 USD). If they work 7 days per week every day of the year they can make slightly more than 2/3rds China’s average urban income. The workers we spoke with had bandages covering cuts on their fingers from the edges of the glass mirrors.

Workers laying concrete were able to make 13-15 cookers per day, thus earning 39-45 RMB (6-7 USD). If they work every day of the year, they earn a few hundred RMB short of China’s average urban income.

One Earth Designs is inspired by Dorma’s success and saddened by the low wages and poor working conditions faced by rural peoples relocating to urban areas (those few able to find city jobs). We are working with local development organizations, universities, and communities to nurture a new generation of nomadic entrepreneurs skilled at merging traditional design practices and materials with modern needs and urban capacities.

Stay tuned for an introduction to our novel solar cooker design, the SolSource 3-in-1, and its potential as a local income generator.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

Good Technology vs. Good Implementation: Recently, a paper was written which greatly offended our friends and partners in China. The paper described local grassroots efforts as being less effective than those made by One Earth Designs and other foreign-led groups because locals ‘lacked the technical ability to create sustainable infrastructure’. This is an opinion that we have heard voiced by many international development workers. BUT creating sustainable change requires much more than just good technology.

My favorite example is a set of greenhouses that one foreign aid organization built here in Qinghai. The organization didn’t tell the villagers how to use them so, instead of growing crops, the villagers stored their motorcycles inside so that the motors would start more easily in the winter.

Without an understanding of the social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts of a region; without both listening to constituents and teaching about new ideas; without follow-through and continuity; and without scalability, development projects (no matter their technical excellence) are doomed to failure.

Informed Impact & Local Students’ Efforts: Unlike foreign-based organizations, local groups have a much deeper understanding of and greater ability to meet these conditions.

In western China, they have done so. Thousands of rural communities have accessed tap water, adopted cleaner cooking technologies, revised farming practices, and built schools with libraries through student and community led grass-roots efforts. A few examples are Shamo Thar’s Development Program at Qinghai Normal University, Pentok, The Bridge Fund (TBF), the Jinpa Trust, the Friendship Charity Association, the Normgo Education Association, and the Snowland Service Group.

Communities and grass-roots development groups have built a wealth of sustainable social and physical infrastructure by implementing their own solutions and reaching out to others (whether neighboring communities or aid organizations) for any additional resources they need along the way.

In fact, it is only when local groups need project funding, technical capacity building, or confidence to act based on local knowledge (even when others might put them down for doing so) that foreign-led groups are any use at all. One Earth Designs aims to build confidence and technical capacity in the arenas of science and engineering, but our impact is by no means comparable to that achieved by the teachers, students, and communities who really run the show.

Foreign Students’ Efforts: The offending paper was written by a student ‘changemaker' visiting Qinghai for just one month. While the author cannot be blamed for misunderstanding the dynamics of local development efforts, s/he should be held accountable for acting upon misconceptions. The same holds true for all student changemakers.

Social entrepreneurship and sustainable development are popular terms among US students. But, although the US university community offers many resources to help students become changemakers (in their own communities or abroad), few turn talk into action. Many of those who do take action fail to understand the communities they work with or to ensure project continuity beyond the 1-3 months of their involvement.

Even worse, I have often heard students lying to the communities with which they are working. I once heard an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) regional staff member counsel local chapters to ‘tell communities that [they] will return regardless of whether or not [they] actually will’ because it ‘fosters a sense of trust’. [NOTE: This does not reflect on EWB as a whole. I have personally witnessed many good outcomes of work done by EWB members]

Students who really want to make change can start out with three steps. First, they can learn from the mistakes and successes of other students doing development projects. Skill-building conferences such as the Global Engagement Summit (GES) at Northwestern University, the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) hosted by MIT, and Clinton Global Initiative University's (CGIU’s) annual student conference are just a few of the great opportunities in this vein. Second, students should spend time travelling and living in the region where they hope to make positive impact. Third, students should learn how they can best help directly from their partner communities.

Sensitivity & Academic Integrity Abroad: Lastly, please make every effort not to jeopardize the lives or work of your community partners.

As changemakers, your actions have the potential to create great positive impact in the world. The positive nature of this impact, however, hinges on your intentions. If your intentions are sincere, they will lead you to respect and connect deeply with those around you. By doing so, you will naturally find a way to do good things in the world.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

When communities are used to having 'gringos' constantly come in to make change and then leave without fulfilling their promises, how do you show a community that you're not just another  one week non-profit, and that you will indeed follow through?

With the political tensions finally calmed, we were able to travel out to the community today. Global Brigades is implementing a new community health workers  (CHW's) program in their communities, and I was able to help out our CHW team as they are running a pilot on their first community. Since we weren't able to travel out to the communities because of roadblocks and safety precautions, the CHW team is left with a time crunch to survey their communities, hire CHW's and pilot their program to make sure it can be sustained after they leave in four weeks. With little time left to complete everything the CHW team wanted to do, I went out with them to help map GPS coordinates of the homes in their pilot community.

My partner and I walked around inputting location information into a spreadsheet, using a phone to get the GPS coordinates of the homes and a camera to take pictures. We then will take this information along with the surveys completed by the CHW team to map the communities and their basic information onto Google Earth. By mapping out the community we can sketch out a map of the community and have information on exactly where all of the families are for future medical reference.

While we were mapping the community, the CHW team was finishing up their sample of surveys, asking families about various health issues, from basic colds to even contraception. After learning more about the trends of the communities I was surprised to find out that other non-profits had come into this exact community in the past to try to help with their healthcare, and left them without accomplishing much. After a community meeting today, it was evident that their was hesitation among the community members. All we can do is show that the program we are doing is worth their time and effort and hope that they trust us help them.

When we visited Professor Musaazi at the hospital (our first time meeting him in person) a few days back, it struck me how different the relationship between co-workers is in Uganda than at home.

Answer this: Your boss is sick in the hospital, what do you do?

Well if you’re kind (and can find the time) you might send a short note signed by the office wishing he feels better soon and maybe send some flowers along with it if it‘s an especially free day for you.

Right?

Maybe at home, but not in Uganda.

We casually entered Mulago Hospital (no questions asked) and walked through the front door, hopped up six flights of stairs to the private ward where the “entitled” patients receive care (only 2 of the many rooms were filled…while downstairs patients were seemingly overflowing into the corridors) and passed into the Professor’s room marked “NO VISITORS: this patient needs rest”. His room was filled with his sister, cousins, and co-workers and he happily welcomed us into the small room thanking us for coming and how wonderful it was to finally meet. When I commented on how many visitors he had he chuckled and said he was glad that visitors were slowing down (…5 people in the small room at once is apparently slowing down), saying the first few days he needed to go on oxygen after the visitors left because so many people came to wish him well. He said he was receiving wonderful care and had three doctors tending to him, who would then refer to ten others to decide on treatment. While we were there, we never did see a doctor (or security to question our presence) but we were assured they were around.

In Professor Musaazi’s 58 years, this is his first time admitted to the hospital, so in some ways his observations were as raw and new as mine. Earlier in the day, from his hospital room in the best public hospital in Uganda, Professor Musaazi sat looking out the window feeling particularly saddened by his view of the lawn six floors below. Looking down to where the government “aided” (as he described with a sarcastic tone) patients’ clothing and bedding was lying out to dry, it started pouring. All he could imagine was sick patients having to sleep in wet beds. This is not how things should be. Naturally, as an inventor might, he said he spent the rest of the day ruminating innovative solutions to the problem. Our world needs minds like this.

I’ve found that working in an international setting, culture-shock is not always an obvious entity, but more an enigma that sneaks up in moments or interactions that do not line up with our expectation of “how things should be”. While Professor’s shock in his first experience in Mulago left him speechless, in a much less monumental way, my getting over the fact that I was meeting my boss when he was ill, in his bathrobe, and in a hospital with his extended family left me making the really straight forward cultural acceptance, meaning… this is now how I thought things worked… but that’s ok. 

A beautiful moment happened today. It occurred during a housewarming party of a friend of my host family’s. The night started like most social events have started here in India. I sat in silence as the guests of the party questioned Sahiba, one of my group members who is living at the same host family as I, about her family, what she usually ate for dinner, and the meaning of her name.

“Are you Indian? Your face is very Indian.”

“You speak Punjab?”

Sahiba and I exchanged a quick smile as she gave her usual explanation that yes, her great grand parents were from Punjab, but her parents were from Kenya, and she was born in and grew up in America. And no, she could not speak Punjab. I occupied myself with the various decorations in the house as Sahiba nodded and smiled politely to the guests who tried to speak Hindi and Punjab to her anyway.

Sahiba and I are experiencing the opposite ends of the spectrum here in India. While I am constantly faced with puzzled looks when I say that I am from America (“Your face, it is not like American.”), and then usually silence, Sahiba struggles with others assuming that she speaks Hindi and understands everything about Indian culture. If I am spoken to, it is usually to ask me about Taiwan, which I, thankfully, can talk about because I lived there for two years, but it is apparent that the idea of an “Indian American” that does not eat chepati every evening and of an “Asian American” doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of most Indians that we encounter. It was my wish that if I could accomplish nothing else this summer, that I could at least convey this idea to those that I met in India.

This happened in a very unexpected way tonight. In India, it is a custom for guests to exchange songs after a meal as a welcome gift. The hosts requested that I sing a Taiwanese song, and I felt relieved that I knew at least one Taiwanese song. I did not think that I would be a cultural ambassador for Taiwan when I came to India, but the guests were very pleased. Sahiba and I then proceeded to sing an American song, and then something I had been waiting for since I got here a week ago occurred. One of the guests pointed out that America was unique because anyone in the world could go there and become an American. The guests then proceeded to discuss the merits of America’s diversity and wonder why the same kind of assimilation and acceptance did not occur as frequently in their own country.

The discussion lasted less than five minutes, but I felt like I had jumped a hurdle. Living in a new culture, I have learned to appreciate little triumphs. When I first got here, my host family never made eye contact with me and hardly ever spoke to me. I have never been so aware of my identity as an American, woman, or Asian. While it is frustrating to be treated by strangers based on these identities, I have learned to manage the different expectations that come with the identities that people associate with me. When one first enters a foreign country, one is undoubtedly judged by appearances. Breaking down cultural assumptions requires patience, empathy, and a willingness to make your voice heard. Participating in a local custom and sharing a simple Taiwanese and American song spoke more clearly than any words could have.