The Fosters

Cross cultural training. What’s the first thing you think of when you hear that? I’ll dare to suggest that in the context of missions, for many, it conjures up thoughts of westerners sitting in a classroom being taught about foreign cultures in far-off places where they may eventually be heading to do some sort of ministry or relief work. The main idea behind such training is that people get some basic understanding of all the various behaviours they’ll witness and then learn how to adapt their own behaviour so that they can ‘fit in’ or at least avoid making cultural blunders and offending others.

I think the above description has been a very typical paradigm within missions for several decades now and many of you reading this have perhaps participated in such a course. But is this training still effective for missions in our present day? What are some of the assumptions driving this kind of training and are they accurately reflecting what is currently happening in global missions?

Over the last few years I’ve repeatedly encountered situations here in East Africa where those assumptions are proving to be inadequate. Two assumptions in particular that I’ve had to rethink are:

• the cultures where missionaries work are homogenous, and
• the missionaries will be working alone (perhaps even isolated) in those cultures.

Here’s where I’m seeing this break down: first of all, more and more, the work we do is among multiple ethnic groups. For example, at the moment, we are working with 35 different linguistic/ethnic communities. The differences that I’ve experienced in working with many of these communities has gotten me to the point where I can say that I dislike it when people refer to ‘Africans’ in anything other than the geographical sense. Secondly, it is far less common for people to be assigned to work alone and not as part of a team, and even when they are, they still need to partner with other local groups and organizations.

Both of these realities have been rendering our typical cross-cultural training and ‘orientation’ courses to be insufficient. The most obvious problem is that the training is only helping one side of the teams! You can train someone as much as you like to go and work with ‘Africans’ but in many cases they’ll now do that work alongside a number of ethnic groups and with expatriates from all over the world. Has everyone had the same training? Likely not.

During the first two weeks of this month we implemented the second instalment of our National Orientation Program. The National Orientation Program turns the typical training upside down and completely reverses the direction of the cultural teaching! The first time we did it was in Dar es Salaam with a group of 14 of our Tanzanian colleagues. This second time took me to Entebbe to implement it with 19 Ugandans. The point of the training is to teach our national co-workers how to work with foreigners! What a riot! In both cases I’ve come away learning way more than I taught… not to mention having a boat load of fun. So far the training has targeted team leaders and higher level staff but I’m optimistic that it’s going to serve everyone else just as well. In the workshop we talk about worldview, general cultural differences across many nations, we even try to get a good Biblical understanding of poverty and look at how different people try to solve poverty problems. The fun part is how the training gets everyone involved and sharing but what is interesting is how differences come out within ‘Westerners’ and ‘Africans’ alike! We also start to see how our own organizational culture has developed over the years and especially how we differ from those around us, not excluding those whom we serve! Soooo much to learn!