The curve of cultural adaptation during a medium or long-term stay abroad

You will not always feel the same way during the time of your stay. This is normal and would happen to you if you stayed in your own country as well. Every person is different and reacts in a different way; nonetheless there are some elements of a stay abroad that are experienced in a similar way by many people.

The following curve will cause stomachaches to scientists and other lovers of academic approaches but it is believed to be a useful indicator of the different phases of a stay abroad.

The hypothetical Curve of cultural adaptation during a six month stay abroad

When you first arrive chances are high that you will find everything very exciting, exotic and fascinating as if you entered a film. Everybody is nice to you and as a foreigner you are allowed to make almost any kind of mistake. This phase of initial euphoria may be more or less long according to how much the reality you find differs from what you expected.

After some time you will find that routine sets in your daily life. You get used to the street scenes around you and you more or less know the people whom you cross at work or in your free time. The touristic aspect of a visit to an exotic place gives way to your first frustrating experiences and incomprehension about people behaving the way they behave. Your counterparts are also not as willing anymore to forgive you all of your mistakes.

You are there long enough to generally know the place, but not long enough to have gained real friends or to feel at home. You see a number of behaviours that are unacceptable or at least strange for you and you cannot see the underlying value system yet. Culture is more than the sum of its visible and tangible elements (music, dance, cuisine, language etc). Many elements of a culture are invisible and it is not easy to identify the social, religious and historical factors that motivate them (use of space and time, taboos, beliefs and values). You feel a need to explain and defend yourself very often which is very tiresome and you feel bewildered by the way people communicate and act around you. You will experience a phase of "culture shock." The experience of this phase again depends on many factors, such as how different the culture you are experiencing is from your own, your ability to express yourself in the language of the region and how much the people you are dealing with, know about your own culture. You will realise that you are under "Culture Shock" when you start feeling easily frustrated, you overreact and behave in a defensive way. You easily get the impression that all your problems are linked to the fact that you are abroad. The adaptation process to a foreign culture demands a lot of energy from you.

After the phase of cultural shock you enter a phase of acculturation and stability. You will gain more and more inside knowledge and understanding about the underlying mechanisms that influence the behaviour of the people around you; you will start being able to see things through their eyes. It does not necessarily mean that you agree with everything they do or that you change your own way of doing things completely. According tothe intensity and duration of your stay and your own convictions, you will take over some of the things that you experience, while maintaining others from your own culture. You will disagree with some ways of living that you experience but you should aim at being able to understand why they developped the way they did.

The curve of cultural adaptation during a short term stay

As for a long term stay abroad, a short term stay (like a 'traditional' workcamp) also follows a process of cultural adaptation. The adaptation might not go as far as during a medium or long term stay, but workcamps really do foster getting to know the culture in which they take place.

Learning some words in the local language, learning about the eating habits and ways of thinking about the world by the local volunteers helps to get an 'entrance' into their way of thinking and doing.

Later on, when going back to the same country, or meeting people from there, you can have a feeling of understanding, creating a sort of 'link' between you and people from this culture. It does not mean that you can understand everything in the way the other sees it right away, and it might not lead to the same understanding as you might get by staying there longer. Still, it is good to realise that there are other ways of thinking.

In a three week workcamp, the following curve can be imagined:

In the first week, everything is still new and interesting and the aspects of the culture that are more or less exotic can be seen in a tourist-like kind of way. You are getting to know the other participants of the workcamp, the local community and their might be a lot of interesting and very visible aspects of the place (like nice buildings, tasty food, 'strange ways' of eating or dressing).

In the second week, you probably already got a bit used to all this. The interesting 'strange way' of doing things can turn into something annoying, the other participants might snore too much or the work can be too hard or not so interesting. You might wonder why you are in the workcamp in the first place and not travelling around to see all the nice, touristic highlights.

But then, in the third week, you might feel sorry for leaving the camp or even the country very soon. You begin to see the nice aspects of the local community and your fellow participants and feel sad about leaving them very soon (probably forever). This can renew your interest in the local ways of doing things and can give back a more positive way of seeing it all.