I have something to confess: I traffic in cultural stereotypes. The French are pansies and hate America; Canadians are bumblers; Mexicans just want to cross the border illegally; Americans are the best. I tell jokes about them, I laugh, I amuse with my stereotypical ideas. I tend to think that American has it going on, America is right, and the rest of the world is trying to be America, and they just aren’t right until they have Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.
That is, I used to stereotype. I don’t so much anymore. What caused this change? I left America. I saw a few small corners of the world. First: Papua New Guinea for a year. Second: Japan, for twelve hours. Third: Quebec, for three weeks. Fourth: the Netherlands, for four days. Now: Lithuania, for 19 days and counting. Even my short times in Japan, the Netherlands, and Quebec were enough to give me glimpses and snapshots into the lives and cultures of the people who live there.
Papua New Guinea for a year was certainly a time of personal revolution. For the first time, I was a white minority in a black majority. For a white southern American, the reversal was startling. Other things changed my thinking as well: for instance, we shopped for our vegetables at an outdoor market. We didn’t buy the imported American brands at the local store because they were at three times more expensive. We walked. How much we walked…something a bit odd for an American to do.
In Japan, everything seemed small, conservative. The cars were half the size of American cars. Space was a premium commodity in Tokyo. My mother, surfing channels in our hotel room was perturbed that there wasn’t a channel in English. And then it struck me: why should there be? We don’t have Japanese channels back home.
Quebec showed me French people that weren’t anything like I imagined them. Despite cynicism that says French Canada is different that France itself, I found many Quebecers who had only recently moved from France. Most everyone I met was kind, gracious, and very friendly.
Holland, the Netherlands, was peace itself. Quiet, homely, and tranquil. I marveled at the slowness. Bicycles outnumbered cars, and pedestrians had the right of way at any roadway. People were friendly, others-centered, and hospitable.
And in Lithuania, I have found a new home. For me, it is a culmination of the past four years of experience. I am once again living in a country that is not my own. I am not passing through in hours, days, or even weeks: I am here for a third of a year. I buy, work, walk, and breathe the air day after day. I wake and sleep under the same sun at a new angle. I insinuate myself into a culture, into the lives of people who are not like me. We speak differing languages, and have different ideas, but I feel at home. I feel settled.
For me, the breaking of stereotypes comes in the infusion of experience. Moving beyond borders, boundaries, and barriers. Shopping for food by picture and deciphering strange alphabets; riding buses and walking rather than jumping in a car; counting hours to 24 instead of 12 twice. All of this is the experience that breaks down stereotypes, for me. I look around and realize that here is a culture, similar and contrary to mine in many ways, and it works every single day for thousands of people. They find joy, happiness, and contentment just as I would back home in America, and suddenly I can find no criticism, no joke, no feeling of superiority: only a feeling of community, of oneness with the family of humanity.
I am so glad that God moved my family to become missionaries, and moved us far beyond the borders of the “Land of the Free” so that I might encounter the free souls of a hundred cultures and lands in places I could never have imagined. I pray that through my own change, I may enact change in others. I would like that the image of ugly America the world tends to see is not reflected in me, and that I can play some small part in changing the ideas of those that would see me as I once saw them, as facades of what they are not, instead of seeing them as the people they are.
a simple man 