Honeymoon, Negotiation, Adaptation, Mastery

It is not every day that dolphins come to town.

Well, they did. Sometime last month, three bottle-nosed dolphins decided to leave their regular habitat in the Shannon Estuary and swam towards the Ratty River in Bunratty, a bustling tourist area in Ireland. Their dramatic abandonment of a safe, saline environment towards a new and fresh water area caused both amazement and concern, judging from the flock of people who gathered there to watch them. While most of the audience comprised of the curious and the caring, there were also reports of young people throwing stones and other missiles at them.

I thought the dolphin story was somewhat similar to a situation when we find ourselves not quite on home ground and trying to adapt. I have just conducted a sharing session on achieving your dreams and studying abroad in a secondary school. Leaving home is a big step and going overseas for work or studies can be a daunting experience indeed.

In the process of experiencing culture shock and adaptation, we go through different phases. Being thousands of miles away from home, researchers agree that adaptation evolves through four stages: the honeymoon stage, the negotiation stage, the adaptation stage and the mastery stage. But of course, there are some who get stuck in a particular stage and remain there.

The honeymoon stage, as the term suggests, is of course exciting, as we drink in the new sights and sounds. If we are avid readers, now is the time to actually see the things that we have read about... snow-capped mountains, idyllic meadows dotted with frisky lambs, pastries at the boulangerie, clothes billowing in the wind, the quintessential bobby complete with truncheon and chimneys puffing.

We stride out in our coats and hats, woollen scarves and mittens and, not forgetting, knee high leather boots, just like they do in fashion magazines. The smell of freedom certainly goads us on to do the creative things that we would never have dared to do at home because, after all, no one knows us in this new land.

The negotiation stage is the stage where reality begins to hit home. It is when we begin to miss the sun that we have taken for granted. We seek out our favourite foods only to find that a decent plate of nasi lemak at a Malaysian restaurant costs 9 euro (RM36). When we get sick, there is no mother around to bring us a bowl of piping hot chicken soup. Although we speak English, we find that shopkeepers have difficulty understanding us because our stresses and accents are in different places. Shopping malls and eating squares that open late into the night are as scarce as hen's teeth.

This stage is worsened by bad experiences. We may be subjected to exclusion where we are regarded as "blow-ins", basically not people of the land. We may also suffer incidents of bullying, racist attacks or comments. Perhaps the most common experience is that ethics, morals and manners all seem to be so different: examples being the legislation of same-sex marriages, the normalcy and frequency of children born out of wedlock and live-in partners instead of the husband and wife union.

For us who honour and respect our elders (even if we think we are right and they are wrong), we are shocked to see adult children lashing out at their parents, calling their parents names and hurling accusations at them. For us who render respectful titles to anyone older than us (relative, friend or stranger) are shocked when children in the host country call adults by their first names, even if the adult is 99 years old.

The adjustment stage kicks in when we learn how to deal with the people around us: their customs, their body language and their expectations. It is at this stage that some of us may retreat into our ghettos where we gravitate towards people from our own country and others may go to the other extreme of being totally like the people in the host country.

Finally, the mastery stage is when we are able to recognise and assimilate the good practices and values of the host country. At the same time, we are proud of who we are -- our Asian heritage and the values and ethics that our parents , teachers and elders have taught us.

So, back to the story of the dolphins which got me started on this article.

Although preparations were made to help the dolphins go back to where they came from, officials from the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) who spent some time monitoring the mammals decided to leave them there for now as they looked healthy and appeared to be feeding well.

Maybe, they had reached the mastery stage.

Source: Columnist - New Straits Times
http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/honeymoon-negotiation-adaptation-mastery-1.281768?cache=%3Fpage%3D0%2F7.170209%3Fpage%3D0%3Fpage%3D0%2F7.320411%2F7.324263