Wednesday 20 February 2013

The Balancing Act...

Having been in Norway for half a year now, i would rather expect myself to have gotten used to the culture and to have fully adapted. So it was a rather rude shock this weekend when i noticed a brief but quite educative cultural difference. We had gone on a trip to the vasfjelletkarpellet, a retreat center in Trondheim  for an inspiration weekend together with 20 students mostly drawn from NTNU, the Norwegian university of Science and Technology. We had a lovely time of Bible study, reflections, playing games in the snow and making lunch in the snow.

Later in the afternoon, I tugged along with some other friends as we went skiing. On a side note, I really do enjoy skiing and is one of those things i will dearly miss. One of the ladies at the retreat decided to join us on the trip. She is from Belgium but staying in Norway presently. We were left behind with her as the rest of the people were quite fast in skiing. She decided to play in the snow and my natural instinct was to take care of her by just skiing near the place where she was playing. When we got tired, we headed back to the retreat center where we engaged in an animated discussion on women, men and culture. 

What I later realized as we chatted was that my instinct of taking care of her may not have gone down well with her as she thought I was looking down on her and not treating her as an equal. Further discussion revealed that we had different concepts of what it means to take care of a lady. We managed to reach an understanding on this but i could not help but notice how seemingly innocent actions can be misconstrued to mean other things especially when we look at them through the eyes of our culture. Was I to do the same thing I did to her in Kenya, it would have been very much perfectly acceptable to most ladies. But now, in a different culture, well, it means something else.

I have noted a few actions like helping a lady carry her luggage are most times deemed as not treating her as your equal even when done in good faith. Again, seeing a female visitor off to the Bus stop is something i have rarely seen here. Most of the time, everyone parts at the door. So now I am left with a difficult conundrum to solve: How do I act within the parameters of treating ladies as equals and at the same time be eager to help whenever necessary without seemingly appearing chauvinistic?