When I wrote the blog post about having a rough week, I used the word stress several times. I realized later what I really meant was culture stress.

Everyone deals with stress. It’s a fact of life. Culture stress is like stress on steroids and there is nothing you can do to get away from it. All you can do is learn to manage it so it doesn’t manage you.

Miriam Webster defines stress as:

constraining force or influence: such as a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation; strain, pressure.

a state resulting from a stress;  especially  :one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium 

In our society today, stress is common. We live stressful, busy lives. We have stress at work, stressful schedules, financial pressure that adds to our stress. Slowing down and reducing stress takes focus and intention. 

Culture shock is defined in Miriam Webster as: 

a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation

Most people have heard of culture shock. To be fair, a person can experience culture shock moving from one part of the US to another. I’ve heard it’s worse when you move between cultures that share a language because you expect things to be the same and they aren’t.

Culture shock resolves itself in a matter of weeks or months. Initial adaptation to the new culture takes place. The “newness” wears off. Things around you don’t surprise you as much anymore. You know what to do, what to expect. But you still haven’t grown completely accustomed to the new culture. Culture shock turns into culture stress.

Culture stress is defined for missionaries as: 

the adjustment stage in which people accept the new environment, adopting new ways of thinking and doing things so that they feel like they belong to the new culture. This takes years, and some missionaries never complete it.

How do stress (as experienced in your country of origin) and culture stress differ and how are they the same?

Let’s start with the similarities. Both are brought on by tension, anxiety, or circumstances around us. Both are an inescapable fact of life. Both must be dealt with properly or they will cause physical problems.

However, there are some significant differences between stress and culture stress.

• Culture stress is brought on by the process of adaptation to a foreign culture. All familiar cultural clues can be thrown out. You have to completely relearn how to respond in every situation. Sometimes this is easy and sometimes it isn’t.
• Culture stress is exacerbated by an inability to communicate in the new culture. Even if the language in the host country is the same as your native language words have different meanings. You have to relearn all of these. Then there is the obvious issue of having to learn to communicate in another language (or languages)
• Cultural values play a huge role in culture stress. If the perceived value system of your host country differs from your country of origin you can become resentful or frustrated with the host country and react to what they do and how they do it.
• Culture stress cannot be avoided. Ever. It is a fact of life that every person living outside their country of origin will experience. You will never completely adapt to your host country. 

Sadly, as adaptation to your host country takes place, your country of origin becomes less and less familiar. Every time you visit, you struggle with culture shock similar to what you experienced when you first arrived in your host country. All the things that seemed “normal” before aren’t anymore. Cultural cues aren’t familiar. You say and do things that people in your country of origin can’t understand, but you don’t notice you are doing them because it’s “normal” in your host country.

Consequently, people who live overseas for any length of time end up in a constant cycle of adaptation wherever they go.

There are positive ways to manage this stress and there are negative ways. I’ll be covering some of this in another post.

When you pray for your missionaries, pray they have the grace and wisdom to adapt to their new culture so they can effectively reach the people with the gospel. This is not always easy. Our desire is for others to see Jesus in us. But when the culture is dealing with me instead of me dealing with the culture, it’s hard for this desire to be realized.

Missionaries deal with stress in their chosen field on a daily basis. Most times it’s small things that add up, though sometimes we face huge stressors and have to deal with them without the normal coping mechanisms set up in our culture. This blog post talks about it in more depth than I’m going to cover here.

For the most part, I try to keep a fairly upbeat and positive view of life. I try. I don’t always succeed. I want to paint a picture of Uganda and Africa for those who don’t live here. Most of what we experience is good. There are times when it isn’t. I’d be giving an unbalanced view if I never told about the bad stuff too.

This was one of those weeks. Let me give you the breakdown:

Tuesday – Water was off all day but we didn’t know it and emptied our water tank — for the third time in a week. When it did come back on, the water came out of the faucet and showers brown.

Wednesday – A hinge on our gate broke, making it impossible to open the gate without breaking the other hinge. This meant we couldn’t drive anywhere, including to church on Sunday, until it was repaired. (The landlord had someone out to fix it on Friday so we were able to get out and go to the churches on Sunday.)

Thursday – Let me go back to Tuesday. The ISP we’ve been using is in bankruptcy. We decided it would be wise to try a different one. James picked one of the two other options we have in our town that are affordable and set up an account at their office on Tuesday. Thursday morning, we discovered that all our data, purchased two days before, was gone. And we didn’t use it. We went to the company but they wouldn’t acknowledge there was a problem. Their only solution? Spend more money for more data (which I was confident would then just disappear like the other had done). We spent most of Thursday and Friday dealing with this company and they refused to even work with us.

Friday – We discovered that the gate problem was really a wall problem and that the recently repaired wall was tilting over far enough that, if we keep getting rain like we have been (rain that we need, mind you!) the wall will fall over in another week or so.

Saturday – We woke to discover that now, instead of being empty, our water tanks were full and overflowing! A valve up in the tank got stuck open. Water was running everywhere. Thankfully, our guard put out buckets and caught enough of it that it didn’t wash out the ground.  Once we used some water out of the tank, the valve began opening and shutting on its own so we didn’t have to call a repairman.

Sunday – We found out more of the roof at Ngarama had blown off in a storm on Thursday and that the refugees hadn’t gotten food rations in a month. To top it off, James squished a mosquito on the windshield and the whole windshield cracked.

Now, usually things don’t go quite like this for us. All this adds up to massive amounts of stress. It’s hard to function with this much stress. It’s hard to be nice to each other and when under this much stress.

But what can you do about it? The only option would be getting away from it and that brings stress of its own.

I’ll be posting about coping mechanisms and how we deal with stress in another post.

On a positive note, I look forward to how God is going to work everything out. (He already worked out the internet problem! He’s amazing!)

When you read these things, don’t feel sorry for us. We made a choice to live here in Uganda. Most of the time we enjoy it. But pray for us that we will handle everything with grace and that people will see Jesus in us.