Posted on February, 11 2008

When cultures clash, there are thousands of little communication problems. Starting with language barriers between a bunch of people who all do not use their mother tongue. It is mostly signs distorted by cultural differences. They are not received the way they were meant to be. A good example is the notion of time. In a country with no watches, you cannot expect people to be punctual, and you have to learn immediately that time is perceived in a totally different way to our western approach. So questions like “when”, “how long” or even “at what time” cannot be answered in the same way we would like them to be.

During my stay in Madagascar I had to learn to give people the benefit of the doubt. Often, something happened that was hard to understand or difficult to take. Getting angry about that sort of misunderstandings for me seemed to be the least attractive option, as it was leading nowhere. An angry person is not able to find out more about what happened without being totally upset and reacting unreasonably. An angry person is busy dealing with his or her anger without being able to see if the problem was not so big after all.

To me it seemed so much easier to assume that the person doing or saying something weird had a reason to do so, obviously acting from another cultural background, having intentions that were hard to understand for me. When finding out about these cultural differences the problem often disappeared automatically.
Like this I had to face less unnecessary conflicts – In a very personal way I also realized that the integration of such cultural differences had a good effect on me: my mood did not get bad after such little barriers and problems. I hugely enjoyed Madagascar with all it had to offer to me.