Our GVI Quepos house is a cacophony of languages, culture, personalities, customs and tastes. On top of that, we live in a country very different from the home countries of most of our volunteers and staff. Encountering one new culture is a challenge, but encountering over eight at one time can be very overwhelming. While our communal house does open up international life-long friendships, it also promotes culture shock. To help us all understand ourselves and each other better and improve our level of communication, I created a manual of eight intercultural communication and self-awareness trainings. Please check out the introduction to my manual:
“When people encounter new surroundings, they often experience culture shock. Culture shock usually occurs when one’s own values and judgments come into conflict with different ways of living and viewing the world. Some symptoms of culture shock that we have seen in the GVI house are extreme nationalism, home sickness, sadness, anger, frustration, lack of investment or hyper concern of details and schedules.
Living in a communal house with several cultures in a foreign country intensifies feelings of culture shock. Some methods for understanding and confronting emotional stress within a tense situation are exercising communication strategies with people of different cultures and gaining more self-awareness. Together, these techniques allow an individual to examine the way they see the world and work towards understanding new and different points of view.
This manual contains eight workshops: four focused on intercultural communication and four focused on self-awareness. Many of these trainings were practiced in the GVI Quepos house from August-December 2014 and are the result of research and graduate lectures. It is recommended to interchange these workshops every week so two week volunteers can enjoy the benefits of both communication based workshops and self-awareness based workshops to more fully develop intercultural communication strategies.”