Landing on Mars

When one goes off to live in a foreign country, whether to do fieldwork or perhaps something completely different, in most cases a state of restless awkwardness and discomfort follows which some people call culture shock in lack of a better descriptor. As for my personal experience with this phenomenon, I mostly associate it with the first time I came to Honduras as a volunteer in 2002, doing social work at an orphanage in this nations’ industrial capital San Pedro Sula. Back then I only knew my high school Spanish which turned out to be of little use in the beginning as this somewhat theoretical training of the Iberian dialect of Spanish seemed to have little to do with the tongue of day-to-day communication I was now presented with.

So, one would assume, that my current situation almost 10 years later, where Honduran Spanish has become a most familiar code of communication for me, would be somewhat less traumatizing for me – and indeed this aspect of cultural shock has not played a great part this time around, although of course I still do encounter dialectal and sociolectal varieties unfamiliar to me, and this can sometimes be a source of some frustration. Such communicational inadequacies tend to make me feel a tiny bit excluded and at the same time it reminds me of what a difficult task it is to understand natural usage of any language that is not one’s native language.

As I said the language was not the main source of culture shock in my recent encounter with rural Honduran people and living – rather, I think it is the sum of all the little things that are all different from what I am used to as part of my relatively privileged existence back home, put together with the fact that I am here for a long period of time without the presence of my dear wife Evelin with whom I otherwise share every part of life. At the same time, this is probably the first time I have ever been so completely and utterly removed and cut off from such basic amenities as grocery outlets, cell phone coverage and regular means of transportation for such an extended period of time as 6 months.

I do, however, have a theory that predicts a certain normalization of my condition at some point in the near future – a point at which the setting, the people and the conditions will become as familiar to me as the famous island became so profoundly familiar to Robinson Crusoe that he hardly wanted to leave once he was finally found.