Learning to Live in Another Culture
By Svetlana Slyusareva

For Gail Burger, '01, being bicultural means she constantly does the splits.

Serving now as an Albanian missionary, she finds herself pulled between two worlds. Being bicultural is a challenge.

"The world you live in is both air and water," Burger said. "It means you think in the images of both languages and cultures. Your 'real' home is an island that no one from either culture fully lives on with you."

Burger has been serving as a missionary in the town of Bilisht in southeastern Albania since September 2004. During her first three months she stayed with an Albanian family and immersed herself in Albanian culture and language.

"To live between cultures is a glorious, uncomfortable walk in shifting sand. One must enter a new culture as a learner. You must learn from the natives of that culture, and you grow to adopt their customs and ways of looking at the world," Burger said.

With the desire to serve people and the willingness to learn a new culture, Burger learned the joy of walking in the steps of both cultures. Even though, as she said, the path is slippery and uncomfortable at times, she is staying in Albania as long as "God has for me to be there."

Satoko Tokura, '05, came to Whitworth University as an international student from Nagoya, Japan. Not speaking her native language with other Japanese students helped her to learn English faster. "Without the right words, it is hard to show and explain my true feelings and opinions," Tokura said.

Another difficult thing for Tokura was being a non-Christian at a Christian college. Another student once suggested to Tokura that she should transfer to a different college. She felt hurt and rejected. But she met few friends who helped her to feel comfortable and to stay at Whitworth. Learning to live in a new culture helped her with her major in international studies.

"Also, it pushed me to be a cultural-diversity advocate, so I could share and help campus community to know other religions and culture," Tokura said.

Tokura said studying in America helped her to learn a lot more about the country she came from. Before coming to United States she did not like living in Japan, but learning about Japan from a foreigner's perspective she learned how to see things objectively.

Since June 2005, Tokura has worked for a U.S. company in El Paso, Texas, which has headquarters in Japan. She is working in an environment where people speak Japanese, English and Spanish.

Burger found the importance of learning the culture from the natives of Albania, and then grew to adopt their customs and ways of looking at the world.

"A foreigner who is not willing to be a child – an observer, a listener, a mistake-maker, a perseverer — will not come to love and belong in that new culture," Burger said.

Tokura says that living between two cultures could help people to understand others as well as to help them to understand themselves better. Tokura now loves her country and is proud to be Japanese because she had an opportunity to see Japan through the eyes of another country.

"It is hard to be in different cultures if you are narrow-minded," Tokura said.