Hello from the Middle East! This summer I am doing my internship for the Principled Problem Solving Scholarship Program at the Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution/Transformation Center in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. That's really a mouthful, so I'll just refer to it as Wi'am for convenience's sake. That's what everyone here does anyways. In addition to my personal blog, which you can find here, I am writing this short article as an assignemtn for the 2011-12 PPS Program, which provided funding for my internship project and a wonderful year of academic and professional experience!
The most important thing I've learned so far in terms of cross-cultural problem solving is to never assume I completely understand anyone. What I mean is that the cultural differences here are so profound that even when conversing in the same language, I and another person could be talking about completely different things. For example, my main responsibility here so far has been revising documents. When I was revising Wi'am's 2011 narrative report, which was my first assignment, I read part of the description of the youth program here describing the peer mediation program to mean that young people were trained at Wi'am in peer mediation, then participate in programs at their schools, similar to such programs in the US. When I asked Zoughbi about another part of the document, he saw my revisions to that part and corrected me that the peer mediation program at Wi'am actually encourages youth to start their own programs, hold informal forums on conflict resolution, and make use of their personal networks. Woops. While it was just a minor mistake, this kind of misunderstanding could cause a very big problem elsewhere!
Another illustration of this is in the completely different approach that Wi'am's mediators take to conflict resolution. I attended one conflict resolution event, a kind of reconciliation ceremony which was completely different from anything I've ever seen in the US. It was at a secondary school where a teacher had somehow "shamed" a girl student. After the event, as Zoughbi put it, "she went to her wise brother for advice, who went to the crazy brother." The brother and a couple friends came to the school and actually beat the teacher, who ended up in the hospital, and subsequently the girl got kicked out of school. Mediators from Wi'am had already met with the parties and "resolved" the conflict. The ceremony in the picture to the right was just a formal process where the guilty party made a public apology to the teacher and the school's headmaster in front of the entire student body. This approach is focused on both parties not only coming to reconciliation, but also saving face in front of the community. Whereas in the US, we would consider a dispute like this to be very personal, between the teacher, the family, and certain representatives from the school. In this instance, the entire community was involved from the students, to the teachers, to the priest who came along to lead the students in morning prayers.
Raymond Cohen, a professor at the Hebrew Univserity of Jerusalem, supports the idea of never assuming understanding in his book on intercultural problem solving, Negotiating Across Cultures (1991, United States Institute of Peace Press). He notes that, "Cultural strangers can rely on no shared experience of family, church, schooling, community, and country. Their national histories, traditions and belief systems may or may not concur. When they comunicate there can be no guarantee that the meanings encoded by one and decoded by the other are at all related" (Cohen, 21). What he is saying, essentially, is that cultural differences, especially in the ways people have been socialized into society, can be such an obstacle to communication that the message expressed by one party will mean something completely different to the other. This means that especially in conflict resolution and problem solving, it is important to take things slowly, reject assumptions, and to build relationships with the parties involved, who can help interpret signals and symbols.
This said, I am doing my best to get out of my normal fast-paced, individualistic work style and take things slow, focusing on building relationships. The Wi'am Center is filled with internationals coming and going, so I am not always the only one speaking English. It is easier to navigate the city since Zoughbi's sons both speak fluent (basically perfect!) English and are easily accessible, as my apartment is on the top floor of their home. The view of Bethlehem from my balcony is stunning:
And I've even managed to attend some culturally familiar events, like this basketball game between part of the Palestinian national team and the local teachers at the American School of Jerusalem in Bethlehem:
For more on my experience living in Bethlehem and working at the Wi'am Center, please see my personal blog at http://thichnhattim.wordpress.com!! Thank you and mar'salam!
