Cross-Cultural Communications

Summer Interns have been given practical training shopping, planning, and facilitating youth conferences. Here Myles is shopping for supplies for our first SLAM conference, comparing price points and exchange rates.

By Myles Gnaster

This entry is written in response to recent experiences in cross cultural communications. My first response to these experiences is that this is one of the areas that I need to improve on, especially if I want to properly be on mission for Christ. Throughout all this trip I have felt the inadequacies of not being able to communicate successfully cross culturally. I have found that the three hardest things to communicate cross culturally are instructions, truth, and vulnerability with emotions.

The main thing I struggled with at yesterday’s conference was having an age and gender barrier between me and the person I was communicating with. When I spoke to someone that was my gender and age range communication became much easier, so in the future I need to isolate that factor that I need to work on. I feel a sense of severe awkwardness when engaged with certain parties. Partially this comes from not understanding when to speak and when to be quiet because Ugandans sometimes don’t speak in one sentence. They’ll break it up with large gaps of silence in between.

In these gaps of silence I would try to speak but they would interject because they weren’t done with their sentence. Overall I think that the age barrier causes the most difficulty because of their different demeanor and knowledge of the English language. Overall I know I have many improvements to make in regards to my cross-cultural communication, but I have a solid base and plenty of people to practice with.