Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross Cultural Workbook

This workbook, Culture Matters, is a map to guide you through your cross-cultural experience and also a way for you to record your thoughts and feelings as you live and work in your host country. It contains a variety of exercises, as well as stories and quotations from Volunteers who have served before you, from experts on cross-cultural training, and from the kind of people you might expect to meet in your new country. Their stories present the exhilaration, satisfaction, confusion, and frustration that are all part of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. These stories and quotations, we hope, will inspire you, sober you, make you laugh, and make you think. You can compare these sentiments to your own observations and reactions as you move deeper into the culture around you. We all would like to find a magic pill for crossing cultures, the “right” answer, a simple list of do’s and don’ts, and you will get some useful do’s and don’ts from your trainers. But crossing cultures is a dynamic, complex process, where context is everything. A list of behaviors or a script can only take you so far, for what is a “do” in one set of circumstances might very well be a “don’t” in another. This workbook will help you function outside the script, to understand the values and beliefs behind behavior, and, ultimately, how the local people think.