During my senior year of college, I spent three weeks abroad in southeast Asia to fulfill my cross cultural studies requirement. My university requires students to travel abroad for two or three weeks with different trips that the school sets up. It’s a unique program and my trip to southeast Asia was one of the highlights of my college experience.
The only assignment for this trip was to write a paper comparing American culture to southeast Asian culture through these five lenses: government, family, education, religion and economics. Now that I live abroad and my life has become a cross cultural experience, I use this framework to process what I am learning. Here are some questions I’ve been pondering these past few months:
Government: How does my country’s government differ from America’s government? What do locals think of the government, and are they free to voice their opinions?
Family: How do close family relationships impact big life decisions like marriage, university education, and job location? How do families work through or solve disagreements?
Education: What are the most popular university degrees here? Is there an expectation for students to go to university?
Religion: How do different sects of Islam affect someone’s openness to the Gospel? What are the main hindrances to someone embracing Christ?
Economics: How are current business regulations affecting the economy and the unemployment rate? How has the recent surge in tourism helped the economy?
I’ve learned that a lot of these questions overlap into multiple lenses. For example, the religious questions I have often spill over into other categories like government and family because my country is governed with Islamic principles. And these categories aren’t exhaustive, there are so many aspects of a culture that are not covered in these lenses!
One of my favorite things about being overseas is how I’m constantly learning and being challenged in the ways I view the world. Living outside my passport country has shown me what it means to be a lifelong learner and to value other cultures as part of the image of God present on the earth. I know that wherever I live, whether that’s overseas or back in the States, that God will use different cultures to teach me about Himself.