For the past number of years I have lived and worked as a Jesuit in Liberia, West Africa. Now I have been reassigned to Canada by my Provincial Superior to Canada. In making this return to my old haunts in Canada I have faced some challenges.
Without listing these challenges in order of importance let us first consider food. Without intending to offend anyone’s sensibility I did not relish African cuisine . This had mainly to do with the question of preparation.
Meat is served on special occasions. Pork was a favorite for feasts. But its preparation often did not include cooking it in an oven in order to reach the requisite temperature to kill germs. Instead the pig was roasted over an open fire near the place where the pig was originally slaughtered. Roasting the pork did not deal with the potential pathogens in the meat such as E coli. Another item on the menu on a special occasion was lettuce which might or might not have been carefully washed to remove fecal matter. Failure to wash lettuce carefully could lead to stomach trouble and other ailments.
At a celebratory meal a Liberian host would offer his or her guests the local delicacy known as palm butter. This is a thick sauce made by grinding and boiling the nuts that grow on palm trees. Palm butter often covers fu fu, which are fermented cassava dumplings. My problem with this menu choice is that I did not appreciate its taste which sounds churlish but was still true.
Returning to Canada I no longer had to contend with poorly cooked pork, unwashed lettuce or other similar hazards. However, as a diabetic, I now have to contend with the large amount of sugar in the Canadian diet. Since my return to Canada my blood sugars have gone up partly due to sugar which was not a problem in Africa.. More generally, the change in diet partly contributed to an increase in my weight. And so, as in Africa, health remains a concern for me.
Fearing that I might have contracted some disease or other while in Africa, upon my return to Canada I returned to the physician I had been seeing before I went to Africa. For a variety of clinical reasons he advised me to undergo a colonoscopy. This has proven to be difficult to do because of the long line-up for the procedure and the practice by specialists of managing these large numbers of patients by practicing “triage”, which is giving priority to the most urgent cases. In Liberia you simply could not have a colonoscopy done because the equipment and trained doctors were not available there. In Canada the procedure is possible but can take time.
Health concerns related to food and access to specialized medicine have not been my only cultural challenges. Others include the ordinary daily encounters with people on the roads and streets. In Liberia one must engage in short conversations with acquaintances you happen to meet. This can take time but failure to do so would be deemed to be insulting. A routine encounter would begin by your asking your interlocutor about his or her family. More personal matters such as how they slept the previous night follow. A surprising general question that it took me time to ask for the first time was the following: “How is your body?”
In Canada people on the street are busy going somewhere and do not seem to have time for small talk. And then, in comparison with Liberia, there are far fewer people out walking. Most are moving about, even for short distances, in vehicles. In Liberia I often felt like an alien because of my non-African race. Children would greet me with the annoying phrase “Hey China man”. In Canada I pass people I might like to speak with but encounter the “sounds of silence”.
My experience of reverse culture shock is a combination of freedom from some negative constraints such as food problems in the country I have left, but the discovery that the same problems arise in a different fashion in the country to which I have returned. The word shock is perhaps too strong. It is rather the case of coping with two realities, neither privileging the one nor the other. What is of fundamental importance in navigating between different cultures is to try to find God in both.