5/21/19 Week 5: Respond to "Cultural Miscommunication".

Cultural Miscommunication can even occur in people who speak the same language within a specific area. I would like to tell you about my own experience. I am from Venezuela, and when I arrived in Argentina, I was very impressed because although we speak Spanish, sometimes it is very difficult to understand each other, due to some words with completely different meanings. I remember a lot in a sacramental, in one of my first Sundays in my new chapel, a sister was speaking and started crying, and she said: "excuse me, but this subject makes me xxx", when I heard that expression I was stiff and started to see around me and think, how can you say that bad word in the pulpit! and there I observed that nobody (except me) was altered. I was able to realize that although in my country it was a vulgarity, here it meant that it was very sentimental...

I had many experiences like that, inside and outside the chapel, until I was able to adapt and take it with humor. Likewise, we must be very perceptive to differentiate these cultural misunderstandings from a rude person. In our future classrooms, different intercultural activities can be done, where we can get to know different cultures, especially if there are students from different parts of the world, and thus when we experience some strange situation, we can have the ability to know and ponder how to respond to it.