Acute Culture Shock

I come in from planting the vegetables that Chestnut brought me a couple of hours after we arrived home: eggplants, roma tomatoes, white zucchinis, capsicum lovingly grown and nurtured. The zucchinis, cucumbers and tomatoes my Dad planted and nurtured for me are doing well now that the temperature has cooled off. Last night I checked the compost bins and one was full of yummy looking compost crawling with slater beetles and woody cockroaches. I dug it into the surface of the vegetable patch I was planting today. The dirt there (I cannot call it soil) is dusty and hydrophobic. I will keep working on that. 

It was a shock to come home and see the place so dry and neglected. I made a rapid tour of the yard, as I’d planned, and found the apple tree and macadamia trees were gone, but the other trees are OK. The ground under the mulberry tree is littered with the dessicated remains of the mulberry crop. Similarly, the apricot tree seems not so densely green, and I can see where the apricots were left to rot on the tree. Oh well. I hope the birds enjoyed some of them. 

There are three beautiful shubunkins remaining in the pond, and a water lily bud is barely beginning to open. The pond is full of green water weed, which I have gradually scrubbed off. The filter is working well enough to clear the water, but I needed to give it multiple scrubs. All the lush plants around the pond are reduced to small clumps with lots of dirt. I have formed a plan for the area, and it’s coming back to life. 

I’ve booked a hard rubbish collection. The termite people are coming at the end of the week, and I’ll talk to them about the big bait stations I’ve found lying around the house, from some other pest control company. I’ve arranged for the lawn mowing man to start taking care of the grass again. I’ve bought a new bed for Jack, whose bed was dismantled, rebuilt and now falling to pieces. Brown Owl has been working on the bicycle situation, and the cats are home. We are gradually finding more things to deal with, as well as the energy to deal with them. 

It’s somehow easier to throw away things I’d treasured and created after they have been neglected for a year. Our chicken run is crammed with things of this nature that are now rubbish. I’m working hard to prioritise all the work that needs to be done, without feeling swamped. There’s time. We are home now. 

For the first three days I couldn’t face the yard at all. I started with the front yard, putting the sprinkler on and soaking the ground. It was very hot, and I did this in the early morning. I could feel the earth beginning to breathe again, and seeing the flock of honeyeaters in the Silver Princess was a sight I could not tear myself away from, just drinking it in. 

There are many things we would do differently now; things we would advise others against. Doing an exchange was a risky process, and a lot of trust was involved. A lot of trust was broken. The notes Brown Owl and I made do not seem to have been consulted, but I think much of that information was irrelevant in the tsunami of difference that must have overwhelmed our Canadian counterpart. 

Culture shock is an interesting experience. When we arrived in Red Deer I had no idea how to engage with the yard. It took me three weeks to work out how to collect the mail. The snow was so foreign to me. I can imagine that in reverse, for our Canadian counterpart. 

Learning how to take care of us day to day was an enormous task. Working my way around the kitchen was difficult. The refrigerator door was full of foods I wasn’t used to. I couldn’t find things that seemed like staples. I asked a lot of questions that may have seemed odd to the people around us. It took time before I was ready to try to drive, or to venture into new shops and start reading labels, for example. I never figured out a general term for “lemonade” and when the boys wanted “milkshakes” in the middle of winter, this seemed impossible to the Tim Hortons server. Canadians are very seasonal people, and they wait for the correct seasons to experience the appropriate flavours and decorations. (What kind of child needs a cold milkshake in the middle of winter?) 

We had been in Red Deer for less than a week. Brown Owl was at her new school, getting her head around the classroom when I called her frantically requesting that she drive to a house we were standing in front of, in the extreme cold, feeling as though it were a matter of life and death. I had bullied the boys into walking with me from our house to their new school (it was still Christmas break), which we had been told was a “9-minute walk”. Getting them out the door was hard. Walking through the snow was a challenge. It wasn’t late in the day, but it felt dark and foreboding. (The Alberta sunshine was a welcome revelation, but that came later.) By the time I called Brown Owl Wizard was refusing to go another step. Jack was shivering inside his winter gear. I couldn’t jolly them into walking home. This was culture shock. 

When we got home three days ago to The Little House of Colours, the house felt so small and cramped. Our luggage filled the lounge room. Wizard said that our Canadian counterpart had “made the house smaller”, when actually he has grown. A lot. 

Whilst unpacking and putting things away, differences made me double take. I had walked through the laundry many times before realizing the cupboards that used the line the wall and house our linen were inexplicably disappeared. There was a microwave sitting on the kitchen counter, and the kitchen counter was a different colour than it had been when we left. This was only the beginning. 

I opened storage cupboards to discover they were crammed with stuff deemed unnecessary to our Canadian counterpart. Fair enough I suppose – I also packed boxes and bags of extraneous stuff and stored them in her basement. The bathroom cupboards were full of cosmetics and hair products. The linen cupboard was full of curtains and cushions and sheets and towels we couldn’t use. 

During the sorting process I realized that our stuff had been just stuffed into the cupboards willy nilly. I’ve engaged in a forensic analysis over the last 72 hours, and I think I’ve worked out how it may have happened. 

Imagine feeling so squeamish that you cannot bring yourself to sleep in a bed that someone else has made for you? Need I defend myself by assuring that everything was clean when we left it? Here’s what I imagine may have happened: 

We arrived after our long trip, to a shabby house in a rundown part of town. It’s so hot! The walls are painted in bizarre colours and nothing matches. I already feel overwhelmed and in need of calm. Plus, everything looks so old and scratched and dirty. I can’t stand it. It’s so filthy and there are spider webs all over it. The red brick looks dirty, and the wood of the other part of the house is unpainted. I don’t understand why it looks that way. There are no screens on the windows. And it’s hot. I find some people with a pressure cleaner and arrange to have the whole house cleaned on the outside. I strip all the beds. We can’t sleep on their bedding. I stuff all the sheets and mattress protectors into a cupboard and replace them with new bedding I’ve just purchased. I didn’t plan to spend all this money on things they should have provided for me, but what choice do I have? These people are so strange. Why did they leave all their beans and rice for me? I can’t eat other people’s food, even if they left me a letter asking me to. I’m just going to move all these bottles of food into the cupboard and replace them with food that I’m used to. And what is it with all these mattresses and cushions? The beds are hopeless. Inappropriate. The rooms are so small and cramped. Why are there windchimes and strange homemade looking ornaments banging against all the external walls? I’ll rip them all off and throw them into the shed. I don’t want to have to deal with them. And these cupboards in the laundry with all these used 

sheets and towels? I’m obviously not going to use them, so they can go into the shed as well. The yard is a wilderness, crawling with bugs and spiders. I feel sick and anxious even walking outside the door. I’m not choosing to feel this way. It’s a response to the environment. I’m not going to be able to sleep in this house. I might go a whole year without proper sleep. I don’t have anyone here to help me and I’m not only responsible for myself. How am I going to take care of my child? Their car is impossibly old. It’s all scratched up and they obviously eat in the car. I hope they aren’t letting their dirty children eat in my new car. What kind of people are they, to think they can take their dirty rough boys to live in someone else’s home? What am I going to find when I get home? What are they doing to my house?     

The rage and bitterness I’ve expressed over the year has been displaced now with a feeling of gratitude. I am older, and from a different generation than our Canadian counterpart. My experiences of poverty and middle classness form who I am. My culture is very different. My style is the polar opposite. That doesn’t make me wrong and her right. It doesn’t make her wrong and me right. It’s just different. 

Culture shock is an interesting experience. I feel that I entered the exchange with an openness and expectation that as a small family we needed to be ready to contend with difference, rather than the other way around. I feel that helped me to learn how to live in another place, which was my impetus for doing an exchange.