FRIENDS OPENED ME TO ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

When my friends came over and saw me prepare these snacks, they were confused. Most feminists among us, or what we thought of like feminism, said I was a servant to men. They did not understand why I needed to bring my parents’ guests anything. There was no praise from them. I felt embarrassed by what they thought of me, whereas I thought I was doing the right thing in my family.

Antithetical to this is how girls are brought up in the United States. Here, being bold, independent, and even fierce is a good thing. Not speaking up means you don't have an opinion of your own, which means you don't think critically or have a strong sense of self, not that you were gracious enough to let others speak their minds and listen to them.

It was not surprising then when my primary school teacher asked my parents to meet her, that although I was top of my class in grades and getting an A, she told them I was too quiet. I needed to speak up in class and share more of my opinions. This was what would jeopardize my grade. My father told me I needed to do better in school. Without realizing the impact of her words, my teacher just made my father speak with me about values that seemed to go against those I was brought up with. I was told conflicting messages, and I didn't know how to reconcile them. This started a spiral of identity questioning that inevitably pitted two parts of my identity against each other, and it felt like there could be only one winner.

WITHIN CULTURAL CLARITY: WHAT IS GOOD AND BAD

What I thought was “good” was “bad” and propagated disempowerment of women in U.S. society. I was a part of a regression seen through the lens of my friends’—and many other—“white” adults’ eyes.

As I grew older, I didn't fully understand the complexity of cultural contexts beyond our linear color graph of good, bad, and grey areas. The grey area implied it could be good or bad depending on the context. I have now discovered that culturally influenced behavior, customs, and traditions don't fit into these bipolar, two-dimensional extremes with the grey area in between—that is, there's no possibility of many traditions having the potential to be either good or bad, right or wrong.

I hope this book allows others to see instead that these traditions are, on the whole, linked to another plane of existence that is deeply meaningful to the individual and families. They are tied to the practice and historical connections that have shaped our values and, thus, influenced our identity.

BROADENING MY WORLD, AND MY WORLDVIEW

My international career began shortly after college when I took a volunteer teaching assignment at a rural high school in the Rayong Province of Thailand. The first few weeks of my time in Rayong were a whirlwind of work at the school, fighting through the normal experiences of any first-time teacher trying desperately to stay ahead with lesson planning and classroom dynamics. I was very lucky to have experienced colleagues to rely on for the basics of student management and to listen to ideas for creative lessons and activities. Very gradually, I built a degree of confidence in my own identity as an educator and took heart in the real progress I saw in my students.

While at the school, I was placed with a host family who owned a large furniture factory. My one-room apartment was perched inside the factory, and my door opened out on 400 people crafting, assembling, and boxing rubberwood furniture for shipment around the world.

While my host family was incredibly generous and amazingly kind, my hometown community seemed far away, and I felt a real disconnect from the people in my immediate surroundings that was hard to manage. Having grown up in a small town in rural Maine, I was accustomed to a sense of neighborliness that was hard to picture occurring in my present circumstances. The physical and cultural distance from those around me seemed impossible to bridge—how would I ever be able to start a conversation?

However, my feeling of connection would come back from the strangest set of circumstances, as one night I got a knock on my door from the brother in my host family. There had been a delay in manufacturing, and an order had to be shipped out immediately. Could I help with the packing?

Feeling a bit awkward, but eager to be of use, I took a spot on the factory floor. I was greeted not with wariness, or even ambivalence, but instead with warm smiles and a happy sense of camaraderie. I was handed a roll of shipping tape and given the task of closing off the box of folding wooden chairs, destined for the shelves of Crate & Barrel.

That experience gave me a true immersion into the Thai concept of sanuk. More than having fun, sanuk is about finding a gentle humor and pleasure in any activity. Jokes, songs, and consistent friendly banter were the norm on the assembly and packing lines, and made the hours fly by.

Soon I was on the factory floor on a regular basis. Welcomed in no small part as a teacher of many of their children, I developed a real sense of belonging with the factory workers. My Thai slowly improved, and the reality of this “far end” of the global supply chain became very real for me, forever altering my perception of how products are made and how benefits of employment and trade are distributed around the world. Most importantly, it was quite humbling to feel such openness from people whose backgrounds were so different from mine.

CONTINUING MY JOURNEY

Since my time in Thailand, my experiences interacting with people with views of the world that are radically different from my own have only grown. When I was 26 years old, I received a fellowship from the U.S. Department of State to teach at a university in the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia.

This was a metropolis of some 250,000 people, with barely a handful of foreigners living full time, mostly involved with the university and medical school. Gondar itself was a former capital of Ethiopia, with the massive fort still standing as a symbol of the Emperor Fasilides's seventeenth-century kingdom that stretched over most of Northern Africa. By the time I arrived, the city (and the country) had suffered through a combination of drought, corruption and misrule, and foreign occupation that had devastated its economy for years. Things were (and are) incredibly difficult for my students. Incredibly bright, talented, and hardworking, they faced daily challenges of supplies and materials, yet they preserved and served as a daily source of motivation for me.

Roughly two months into my time in Ethiopia, I developed a cough and mild fever. What might have kept me home in bed for a morning in another place felt like a major cause for concern in this isolated community, so I headed into the local clinic to see what might be occurring. In a tiny office with chemical reagents housed in recycled plastic milk containers, a lab coat–clad doctor drew my blood for testing. I went over to his office and waited a short while, and finally the doctor came in with the results.

“Your bloodwork has come in and shows signs of malaria. Do you agree? If so, we would like you to start you on antimalarial medication.”

I was momentarily dumbfounded—the idea that a medical professional would ask for my “agreement” on a diagnosis was totally outside of my way of thinking. After a moment, I realized this unique phrasing was a small sign of a slightly different framework around decision-making, wherein no important judgments could be made without some sense of discussion and consensus. With this in mind, I agreed with the verdict, and returned to my home for a few admittedly harrowing days of recovery.

I have been amazingly fortunate that my professional life has given me the opportunity to work closely with people from around the world. As the founder of an educational travel organization, I collaborate on a daily basis with people from drastically different sociocultural backgrounds from my own. For this book, I wish to impart some of the frameworks and lessons that I've learned along the way, and, most importantly, to ensure that the kindness I have had in my life continues to be “paid forward” by well-intentioned educators everywhere.