Back to kindergarten?

Yesterday my 5 year old friend Micah (secret aliases: Buzz Lightyear, imaginary jungle explorer, and Acadia’s personal Kurdish tutor) laughed at me as I painfully attempted to learn to count to ten, informing me that Kurdish kindergarteners are smarter than me!  I eventually succeeded, but today was again humbled by the realization of another kindergarten lesson I may need to relearn, this one a bit more significant.

Respect. It’s sung about, plastered on every corny middle school instructive poster, and trumpeted as our most basic right. I arrived in Iraq gung-ho on respecting and appreciating new culture. I’m a responsible traveler and world citizen, right?!  But guess what, counting to ten (or a million) in Kurdish may be the easier task.

Operating under a different system of “rules” concerning everything from when it’s permissible to drink water or put on chapstick, to how to hand money to a shopkeeper, to what to wear is exhausting! Only a short time into my stay here, and I had decided halfway through our bazaar adventure today that I’d rather to believe that other kindergarten lesson, “it doesn’t matter what other people think.”

In this case, it does matter. It matters because the compassionate and right thing to do considers how my actions affect those around me, even via what they think. Our conduct matters to the future of PLC, affecting their ability to continue to operate here. It matters because it has the power to either reinforce or redefine stereotypes of Americans, and the resultant equivalent, all Christians. It matters because if I don’t make an active effort to understand a people I know nothing about, I will never understand.

So instead of frustration at double standards I see, or uncomfortable situations in which I want to revert to familiar, easy American manners, I am working on being thankful for this reminder to not live by my own “rules.” If only I consciously considered how my actions affect those around me EVERY DAY of my life; under that definition, respect means much more than not stealing your neighbor’s crayons and Goldfish crackers.