Stuff You Notice During Reverse Culture Shock PART I

I’ve gone through reverse culture shock at least twice in my life; once coming back from South Korea, and again right now, after two months back from Indonesia.  Arguably, coming home from college was another culture shock before that. When you first arrive in a new place, you notice everything, and your mind is hyper aware. When you come back home from a really different culture, you have that hyper aware feeling while also dealing with the mundane and familiar and whatever expectations you have about what life is like in your hometown. Eventually you are left with a paranoid, jaded, bored feeling that’s something like teenage angst.

I think I’ve been making excuses for still having teenage angst for the entirety of my 20's 
(Photo by Flikr user .sarahwynne.)

Anyway, I’ve decided to outline some of the feelings/realizations I’ve come to during my 2-3 months of reverse culture shock since I've returned home. This is the first part of a longer post. I will write and post the rest later.

1.       





Formality, accents, and the repetitive expressions people use are weird.

When you first move to a new country and barely understand the language, you feel intensely curious. What are those people saying, exactly? And slowly, ever so surely, time passes, and you start to understand people. You start hearing the same words over and over again…and again…and again…and again. Eventually you totally understand those common expressions, and not only do you understand them, but you’re intensely irritated by them. Do you have to ask me where I’m going all the time, or if I’ve eaten, or taken a shower? Why do Indonesians (or insert any nationality here) keep asking about such stupid, pointless things?  Why do they have to use the same expression over and over again? Why is that silly song about where that kid’s dad is so “funny”?

Because you’re hyper aware, you start to pick out the expressions and tones people use to sound tougher, sadder, to get pity, to flirt, to fake humility, etc. Because you actively have to learn how to do these things in a new culture, it’s almost like watching people put on and take off masks because you are trying to learn how to do what is they’re doing.

Or I’m just saying that because I wanted to reference this book and sound cultured 
(photo from Wikipedia)

Silly things start to annoy you even if you know that logically you shouldn’t be annoyed. Why do people keep using religious words? Why do they keep talking about God? Why do Korean girls put on that weird whiny accent all the time?

When I try to explain to someone what reverse culture shock feels like in the simplest way I can, I usually retell this anecdote: I went to a local diner in Westchester County, NY a few days after I got back from Korea. As I was sitting there, the room seemed so loud. More than one person who’s lived abroad for long periods of time in an non-English speaking country has agreed with me that when you come back home, sometimes it feels like everyone is talking to you. You can finally totally understand everyone around you, but you’ve just spent a long time getting used to people using English only when they want to talk to you. This feeling was stronger when I returned from Korea than now, after returning from Indonesia. It’s possibly because I speak Indonesian more fluently and more Indonesians would speak to me in their native tongue than Koreans would. 

Number of People of Asian Descent in America (not including mixed race) [From Wikipedia]

Group	Population 2000	Population 2010	Percent change
Indonesian	44,186	101,270	58.6%
Korean	1,099,422	1,463,474	33.1%

(And yet, just going by these numbers knowing Korean better would have opened a lot more opportunities for looking cool in Asian neighborhoods in America…)

What also struck me in this diner was just how strong everyone’s accent was. The English speaking foreigners I had been around were not from Westchester, New York. And there I was, suddenly hearing aw’s instead of a’s, the false aggression, the abrupt, harsh staccato characteristic of New York accents and feeling really irritated. Did they really have to talk like that?

What everyone sounds like right now
(From Friends Wikia)

Many Korean teachers of English have a habit of telling their students that English doesn’t really have formality. I used to say that just because English doesn’t use honorifics and different levels of language, doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to be more formal, which I think they knew, more or less, but they didn’t totally believe. So I used to make some basic rules for my advanced students: Generally you use more passive sentences, you avoid “I” or “you,” and strong emotions, and you make use of more Latin based words instead of Anglo-Saxon rooted words (i.e. you use “reception” instead of “welcoming” or “commencement” instead of “beginning”, “refrain” or “desist” instead of “stop,” etc.).

Of course there are many formal things that Koreans do at meetings or when greeting each other that are unnecessary for Americans, such as always shaking your elder’s hand with two hands instead of one, using titles instead of first names, and generally avoiding eye contact. Trying to learn all of these extra things at first can seem exhausting and silly. But when I came back from Korea, I felt so irritated when waitresses nonchalantly put plates down with one hand.

Before speaking in meetings, Indonesians generally say an Arabic blessing before they talk. And before making formal speeches, my students used to add two paragraph long blessings praising Allah and his creation. At the end of the speech, they would apologize for mistakes. When I said goodbye to my host family, I also apologized for my mistakes. Sometimes I’d get so annoyed with these formalities. They took so long.

But I went to a work meeting last week, and before the boss even started speaking, he spent a few minutes praising everyone, wishing everyone a good vacation, mentioning different family members and wishing good health. Before the meeting ended there was another five minutes of praise, of formal thank you’s, of encouragement. I’m sure someone could write whole research papers on what this implies; why do Indonesians use their formal speech for praising God and talking about the world and apologizing, while Americans use their formal  speech for gratitude and encouraging individuals?

When I first got to Indonesia the constant Inshallah, Alhumdulilah, Mashallah, and  assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarokatuh  was overwhelming because it comes from a different religious background than the one Western civilization is based on. But being back, I’ve been reminded of how often people in America say “Lord,” “Jeeze” “Jesus” “Jesus Christ” “damn” “thank God,” “God forbid” and “Oh my God.”  And it’s reinforced the idea to me that just because someone is steeped and in a certain religious/cultural background, the way in which someone speaks doesn’t necessarily reflect how personally religious that person is.

2.       

2.  Everybody asks stupid questions

At the risk of making myself and my fellow Peace Corps volunteers seem like a bunch of jerks, sometimes we would compare the dumbest questions Indonesians asked us.  There were the inevitable questions about America’s reputation for “free sex,” and inappropriate questions about the status of our virginity. There were the religious questions, “Do you know who Adam and Eve are?” There were questions about wealth; “There are no pot holes in America, right?” “All the roads are perfectly smooth, right?” “Everyone has a big house in America?” There were ignorant questions about race, “Is that [insert nonwhite race] person actually American?”  Then there were questions like “Are there many zombies/superheroes/vampires in America?” “Does it rain in America?” “Are there trees in America?” “Are there mountains in America?”

That "America The Beautiful" song is a total lie. Don't believe it.
(Photo of the Rocky Mountains from Wikipedia)

                

As silly as some of those questions were, I don’t think that it meant the people asking them were stupid. Indonesia and America are on complete opposite sides of the world. They’re connected to completely different global networks (America to the West and Indonesia to the Muslim world and to Asia). There aren’t many Indonesians living in the US (according to the 2010 census they were only the 15^th largest group of Asian Americans) and the majority of Indonesians living in the US are Chinese Indonesians (over 7000 of which were asylum seekers) and not the Muslim, Sundanese Indonesians I was living with. 

“Sundanese” is the name for the ethnic group that lives in West Java and has nothing to do with Sudanese people living Africa. I’ve confused a lot of people since I’ve gotten back

Sundanese people (photos from Wikipedia)

                For the most part, people asked me those questions as a conversation starter. Sure, many of them had seen American movies or music, but most of them had never really thought about what life was actually like in America. These questions were an invitation for me to talk about the weather, the nature, to talk about myself, to connect. Somewhere in there was a bit of national pride, too. They weren’t just asking me if America had mountains or trees or rain, but if we have mountains as grand and numerous as Indonesia, trees as green and lush, or rain as pounding and heavy.

                People in America ask “stupid” questions also.  “Your students knew how to use Facebook?” “If some people had smartphones, air conditioning, wifi, etc., weren’t they not poor?” “What do you mean that some people weren’t poor?” “What language do people speak in Indonesia?” “You don’t have to get sassy, Indonesian isn’t a real language, is it?” “Most Indonesians are Muslim?” “Didn’t you have to wear a burqa?” “Are women allowed to do anything?”  “Wasn’t it hard to live with all those Muslims?”

                People have ideas about what a Muslim country, or an Asian country, or a Peace Corps country should look like. They especially have ideas about Muslim countries, and a lot of people are looking for me to confirm some of their biases. This makes it difficult to honestly answer some of their questions because, although I may not have a hundred percent positive opinion about something, I know that if I say anything negative to many people ,they are going to take that and run with it and use it to confirm whatever they think is true. For example, no, I didn’t have to wear a burqa. I saw more women wear tank tops or mini-skirts in Indonesia than I ever saw in a burqa or niqab. Did most women cover their head, yes, but I didn’t, and aside from a couple of religious ceremonies, I was never told I HAD to cover my head. (for the confused, here is an easy guide to different types of Muslim coverings).

Did I ever feel judged for not covering my head or annoyed that the Indonesian media sometimes pushed a narrative that women that covered their heads were more morally pure than those who didn’t? Absolutely. But the average person I meet is not interested in listening to me say no, Indonesian women are not forced to cover their heads, but outside of urban areas there is a huge social pressure cover; there are many reasons, but some of which include cultural ideas that stigmatize female sexuality, that looking overtly religious is tied to looking more upper class, the Indonesian fashion industry and popular trends, and the emulation of Arab culture as a push back to growing Western influence.

Interestingly, Indonesian mass media tends to show a lot less covered women than the proportion of covered women you see on the street. For example, this video for Indonesian Independence Day (August 17), in which I saw only ONE woman with her head covered. 

However, I don’t necessarily think stigmatizing female sexuality means that women are totally disrespected or undervalued. No one in Indonesia ever told me women with stupid or evil or worth less than men. Women there are more comfortable breast feeding or openly talking about their periods than they are here. However, female virginity is still viewed by a lot of people as a marker of moral character, there are huge numbers of teen pregnancies or underage marriages, women are often labeled as more emotional and less able to lead, etc. What I’m saying in too many words is that the position of women in Indonesia, like in most countries, is complicated. And while I am not completely okay or blind to the issues Indonesian women face, I don’t want always bring those issues up to people who don’t know anything about the country. Call it paranoia, but I don’t want people to use what I say to confirm an extreme view that dehumanizes the people I lived with for two years.

                Did I ever find things difficult about living with a Muslim community? Yes, of course. But sometimes when people here ask me about it, they ask it with an expectation already in their heads. They are setting themselves up to hear a story that is some kind of an “us versus them” tale of how I somehow managed to deal with people who were utterly inscrutable and confusing. It leaves me feeling like I can’t be totally honest about the things I didn’t like because it feels like a betrayal.

There are things I don’t care for about Islam, such as that stigmatization of the female body and sexuality (to be fair this exists in Christianity and Judaism and plenty of other religions to various degrees, too), sometimes the sheer amount of rules and how particular Islam can be about diets, the proper way to pray, to eat, or to conduct one’s life can also be confounding and frustrating. So can trying to understand the reverence for Arabic culture, having to wait for people to pray, how loud the call the prayer can be, and the fact that living as a minority in any culture is hard and creates a lot of stress even when the majority isn’t actively or overtly trying to change you or make you feel bad.

But at the same time, there are things I admire about Islam. I admire the discipline, the order, the commonality. I can appreciate how many aspects of Islam were revolutionary for the Middle Ages (and now) and how it promoted reflection, scholarship, hygiene, and law. I appreciate its racial tolerance and emphasis on humility. And as annoying or shocking as the Adzan, the call to prayer, was at first (at 3:30 in the morning when the Mosque is right in front of your house and the speaker is broken and distorted and blasting at an angle directly into your room and sung by an old man with an extreme smoker’s cough, I was especially not too happy), I can appreciate it now for how well it fit into the rhythm of the agrarian day. The sound seemed to rise and fall with the heat, to follow the birds on their path through the day, and served as a way to make you feel connected with everyone around you.

My view during the evening call to prayer

Noontime

How do you explain this and so many more feelings to people that ask? Most people don’t care or need that long of an explanation. I know some people would selectively hear only negative things, and it’s very sad to imagine that these people who took me in for two years, that became my friends, that have individual personalities, might become nothing more than a simple label. Sometimes I want to have a more honest conversation with someone about things I might not like about Islam, or Indonesia, or even my specific village, but I never want to reduce the people I lived with or the culture around me to just a hardship I had to deal with rather than these living, breathing, complicated, nuanced things that they really were.

My students

Me and some of my bros

Me and my host family

3.       I could be more forgiving/tolerant

Stupid questions are annoying. But as I said, sometimes people are asking you stupid questions because they are trying to get close to you or give you attention or connect to you but don’t really know the best way to do that. A lot of volunteers complain about the bluntness of Indonesians, especially when it comes to physical appearance. If you’ve gained weight, look tired, have a pimple, or seem ill, Indonesians are not likely to beat around the bush. They say it directly.  This can be extremely stressful and shocking, especially when you first arrive in Indonesia (Koreans also are pretty blunt about physical appearance, so perhaps I was a bit prepared for this). There are some people who are trying to tear you down (like there are everywhere), but as I advised some new volunteers coming into Indonesia as I was leaving, sometimes people just say stupid things because they’re trying to connect with you and they don’t know what else to say or do. And no, they’ve never thought about whether or not it would be offensive to talk this way or that way to an American because it’s not something they’ve ever had to think about in their lives.

                When an Indonesian friend bluntly asked me about the death of my grandfather two days after it happened with a big smile on his face in front of a crowd of people, I know he wasn’t trying to upset me. He was trying to connect with me, however tactlessly. And yeah a lot of people asked a lot of stupid questions about America. But they all have their own lives and worries. It’s not their job or priority to know any in-depth details about America.

                In regards to the stupid questions I get in America about Indonesia, I think it’s easy to write off people that ask me stupid questions as ignorant or prejudiced. Or, I could accept the fact that just as it’s understandably not relevant for the average Indonesian to know anything about America, it’s not a priority for most Americans to know anything about Indonesia. Instead of getting annoyed—I mean this is the country with the fourth largest population in the world, and considering that our own government was very active in their country through the second half of the 20^th century, it’s pretty bad that Americans barely know Indonesia is a country—I need to just accept this reality. Most Americans don’t know about Indonesia because of some malicious hate for Indonesians; it’s just a result of international politics, colonial history, Western Imperialism, globalization, etc. I can’t expect Americans to know about Indonesia or be experts on South Korea. All I can ask is for openness and a willingness to listen.

                When you live in another culture, you are constantly fighting an internal battle to remain relative, fair, and patient. I have never been and will never be those things perfectly. But sometimes when we go back to our hometowns and countries it’s easy to forget that patience. It’s easier to get mad at the people we meet back home because they’re a lot like us, but they’re less open or knowledgeable. And sometimes we do definitely have the right to call those people out on the stupid things they say because we know more about their lives and cultures. But they haven’t been the places I’ve been.  Most people haven’t had to change so dramatically and to examine their world views so drastically. Some people have been able to go through life without ever being forced to really question the things they believe and somehow been able to avoid or not think about things that might challenge some of their view points. And you know what, just because I’ve lived in Asia for over six years doesn’t make me some paragon of wisdom either. There are plenty of things that people who’ve never left their hometown will experience that I never have or never will.

                But just as I had to learn to accept (even if I didn’t like it at all) that there are Indonesian men that married 13 year old girls and are not in jail or hated, I need to accept that there are some very hateful, condescending people in my home country. Despite the ugly things about them, they are still human. I cannot change someone’s opinion if I write them off as an enemy or as a complete idiot. Finding patience for the ignorance of people from your own culture can be an even tougher and less successful battle.

A very, very difficult internal battle
(picture from Flikr user Gage Skidmore)

And who knows, even with all of my traveling and my mind opening experiences and my worldly new perspective, perhaps life or history will prove me to be a hateful, ignorant moron because I hold some viewpoint I’d never even question as problematic.

Things my grandchildren will tell me after the biggest scientific discovery of 2060: 
"MOSQUITOES HAVE SELF AWARENESS, COMPLEX EMOTIONAL LIVES, AND PRODUCE ART AND MUSIC, YOU HORRIBLE GENOCIDAL ASSHOLE!"
 (Photo from Wikipedia)

I Wish I Could Promise You They'd Love You: A non-Muslim American living in a Muslim country’s perspective on American Islalmophobia

On my last New Year’s Eve in Seoul, South Korea, while out with friends at a restaurant, I happened to meet a young woman co-worker. She and I were about the same age (25), she had been in South Korea about as long as me (more than three years), and she was also American and from the North East coast. She was out with her boyfriend, a soldier in the US military, and by the time we ran into them, they were both pretty drunk. We spoke for a little bit, and she asked my friend and me if we wanted to move places. I said that I wanted to wait because I was trying to convince a male friend of mine to come out and celebrate the New Year holiday.

“Do you like this friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I answered. “But we can probably leave. I don’t think he will come out. He is Muslim and doesn’t drink.”

They both stopped and looked at each other.

“Do you want to date this guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many other girlfriends does he have? Are you going to be one of his wives?”

“…what?”

“You know, we were looking for a friend to bring out with us, and you could be that friend, but we won’t allow our friends to date a Muslim.”

“Um…okay…”

This conversation continued for a good ten minutes with them both ranting about how absolutely terrible it would be for me to date a Muslim man and how terrible Muslims were until finally our group split. Looking back, I should have told them what they said was wrong more aggressively, but I didn’t because they were drunk and it was a holiday. I didn’t feel like arguing or fighting.

After that, I only saw them a few times in passing, but the incident stuck with me. I wouldn’t call their reaction normal, but it wasn’t unbelievable either--especially not after reading some of the news coming from the US lately. Although I was aware of prejudice against Muslims before this, what struck me about the incident was that it was coming from two people that were presumably well educated (one had finished a Master’s and another was in Master’s program at a fairly well-known liberal arts school), from a relatively liberal part of the US, and both were well traveled and working in another culture (albeit, not a Muslim one). All of these factors presumably should make for a fairly open-minded individual, drunk or not. At the very least, they should have had the sense or shame to stop ranting or apologize for their offensive comments.

At the time of that incident, I had no idea that Peace Corps would send me to Indonesia, a country with 249 million people, 90% of which are Muslim, and incidentally the home country of the friend that I had been texting in the previous story.

Since I came to Indonesia about a year and a half ago, I often find myself thinking about what would happen if someone from my village, located a few hours’ drive outside of the capital, Jakarta, moved to America. What if they moved to a small, rural, and economically depressed town in America, perhaps in upstate New York or Pennsylvania, a few hours’ drive to New York City? I wonder how much attention he or she might attract, especially if she were a woman who wore a hijab; probably not nearly as much attention as I do in my village, where people almost daily ask for pictures and barrage me with questions about my origins. You are much more likely to see a foreigner in a small town a few ours away from New York City than you are a foreigner (especially a young, white, female foreigner) in a small village outside of Jakarta. But what if he or she went to some remote Appalachian town in Kentucky, or a fishing town in Maine, or some very small town in Alaska? It’s hard for me to say what the reaction would be because I’ve also never been to those places.

I do think that a random Indonesian coming by his or herself to a small town near where I grew up on the North East coast might at least get a lot of questions about her home country from curious people. Americans don’t really know much about Indonesia at all, and I guess that very few even realize that Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. I took an anthropology class in college once with the extremely broad title of “Islamic Culture,” and we barely spoke about Indonesia.  I don’t think this was an intentional oversight of the professor, but simply the result of the fact that he had worked in the Middle East and Africa. But it doesn’t change the fact that for the most part most Americans are very ignorant of Indonesia, and I believe most of them have a very narrow image of who a Muslim person is.

At the risk of generalizing, I think for many Americans, the average Muslim looks like a Saudi Arabian, or maybe someone from Iraq or Egypt. These images aren’t necessarily wrong, but rather narrow. A woman in Saudi Arabia might cover most of her face in public with a black cloth, but a woman from Kazakhstan might go out with bare soldiers to a club and drink vodka, while a young Indonesian woman might dress with a brightly colored headscarf and wears extra covering when she prays. Ask a black American Muslim and an Afghani Muslim how each one interprets a verse of the Quran, and you’ll probably receive very different answers. Similarly, a Catholic Pope from Argentina seems to interpret church doctrine very differently than a Catholic Pope from Germany.

Before moving on, I want to say that I don’t mean to stereotype entire countries either; there is great diversity in how someone practices a religion even within the same country, same province, same town, same community, etc. because people are individuals, not labels. My point is that while many Americans can accept two different Popes with radically different viewpoints as both Catholic, they seem to have a much harder time realizing that Muslims, too, are individual people. Islam is not some static, unchanging force unaffected by local culture, history, economic situations, power dynamics, technology, or global and local politics.
In Indonesia I have met Muslims who drink, smoke, and have multiple girlfriends (and in some cases wives, though this is pretty uncommon in Indonesia), and I have also met Muslims who never do any of those things and are extremely devoted as family men and fathers. I have met Muslims that dislike Western culture influences and others that totally embrace them. If someone tells you that they are Muslim, the only thing you can assume about them is what holidays they celebrate because Islam is a religion almost 1500 years old spread across countries, borders, cultures, and languages. It is not a recent cult, a tightly knit organization, a membership club, or a corporation.

ISIS and other forms of Islamic terrorism are not inevitable, constant, or ubiquitous in the Muslim world. In the United States, we have the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church, both of which are influenced by Evangelical Christianity but are not representative of everyone that practices the religion. They are groups born of the political and historical climate of the American South, and it would be ridiculous to claim that all Evangelical Christians are violent racists or homophobes or that Evangelical Christianity inevitably leads to violence. And consider that the entire Muslim world is much more populous, spread out, historically older, and vastly more diverse than the population of Evangelical Christians. You don’t have to like or agree with Islam as a religion to see the logical fallacy in categorizing all Muslims as dangerous or as having some Western Society destroying agenda.

Despite these obvious facts, there are Americans at political rallies claiming that the US has a problem with Muslims and “secret training camps” where Muslims are training to destroy us. Muslim students are humiliated or isolated for their religion or treated as dangerous. Muslim travelers in the US are often harassed at airports. People make up rumors that our president is Muslim as a way of de-legitimizing him, never mind the fact that legally, even if he were a Muslim, he still has just as much right to be president as a Christian in a country with freedom of religion. They imply that as a Muslim he would not be able to defend his country from Muslim terrorism or would somehow be sympathetic to Muslim enemies, ignoring the fact that sharing a religion does not automatically make two people friends. Furthermore, it historically has rarely made two peoples immune from violent conflict. ISIS kills more Muslims than people of any other religion. People suggest that solutions to the problems in the Middle East should involve nuking the entire region, and our country is loath to accept Muslim refugees from the Syarian civil war, an awful conflict that we helped escalate.

Eighty years ago, another political group became powerful by making the ridiculous claim that all the people in a global, ancient religion were part of some world destroying networked conspiracy. We look back at the Holocaust with disbelief—how could Germans and Nazis really believe that all Jewish people were part of some ancient conspiracy? And yet now we have Americans that seem to think that anyone who practices Islam, a much more populous religion than Judaism, has the potential or desire to become a violent terrorist.

I live and teach in a nearly 100% Muslim community. I have been here for a year and a half and guess what? The vast majority of the people in my community do not care one bit about what the average American person is doing right now. They care about their jobs, their families, their wives, their husbands, their children, their Facebook accounts, their cell phones, their plans for the weekend, their prayers, their dreams. The average Ahmad in my class does not care about building bombs, he cares about building a speaker so he can play Bob Marley or Metallica loud enough to annoy his neighbors. To him, ISIS is just as much a scary boogeyman as it is for Americans. He is not thinking of boarding a plane to destroy America, he is thinking of going to Saudi Arabia to make his pilgrimage. He isn’t worried about whether Western influence is destroying is soul, he’s picking the movies, games, and books that he likes from countries all over the world. He doesn’t care if Americans are having pre-marital sex or if they are converting to his religion; he cares that Fitri, the girl in the next class, smiled at him this morning. He’s wondering if he should get her phone number and try to text her. Like most teenage boys in America, his biggest dilemma is how to get a girlfriend, not how to topple the American empire.

                I won’t claim that there is absolutely no prejudice or ignorance about non-Muslims and foreigners in my community. One of my students told a Peace Corps staff member that she thought all Americans were sadists until she met me. I have had people ask me to convert and made passive aggressive comments to me, such as “you would look so much prettier if you wore a hijab.” Men have asked me impolite questions that they would never ask a Muslim woman. I have been harassed on the street and shouted at because of my skin color. I cringed when a teacher at my school thought that my new principal might be Catholic because he used to work at a Catholic high school, and she was nervous about him leading the school if that were true. I have seen a couple of Indonesian friends post anti-American memes or articles that generalize about Americans or Christians on Facebook. I had an Indonesian friend tell me that Hitler wasn’t that bad because “he only killed Jews, and Jews are evil, look at what they do in Palestine” (as awful as that statement is, at least that person was willing to listen to me and reflect on his opinion when I told him how offended I was). There are cases of religious violence in Indonesia. Every once in a while, churches are burned or protested (and in Christian provinces, sometimes Mosques are also burned). All Indonesians are legally obligated to pick one of five religions (Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist), and marriage between religions is technically illegal. There are extreme political parties in Indonesia that want to ban pre-marital sex and alcohol, and there is often some controversy when non-Muslims gain very politically powerful positions at the federal government level.

  [Some of these issues are further discussed in the blog of a different Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer who is a Muslim American, which you can read here: http://blackhijabiinindonesia.com/2015/09/13/hijab-privilege/ ]

                All that being said, the vast majority of people that I’ve met here, have accepted and loved as I am. I have been welcomed. I have never been told to go home. I have never been called evil, violent, or accused of conspiring against the people in my community. I have never been the suspect of a crime, had my things destroyed, or been overtly bullied. I have never been held responsible for things other Americans or Catholics have done. I have never been blamed for the actions of my government. No one has told me that the world would be a better place if my entire country were nuked or destroyed. I have been invited to religious ceremonies without being forced to participate. I have had Muslims offer to find churches or Catholic communities for me. Furthermore, just because some reverse prejudice exists doesn’t make other prejudice excusable or okay, especially not in the US, a country that preaches liberty and opportunity for all peoples, no matter their background.

 

A fellow non- Muslim Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer wrote in a recent blog:

            
“The people who took us as strangers into their homes are in fact Muslim. These are the people that taught me how to eat with my hands, how to use a squat toilet, how to get from point A to point B, which bus to get on when I am traveling, invite me to their family gatherings, and take care of me when I am sick. Most of these people would give me the shirt off of their back…This is my country of service and these are the people I am serving alongside. I consider that to be a privilege. It is disturbing to me that just because the Extremists also claim to practice their religion, they get a bad reputation for it, and it is not fair in the slightest. One of my students was actually under the impression that Muslims were not allowed in the United States because of all the hate she has seen on the media. That breaks my heart…So for the next person that wants to try to preach their  “Islamophobia” towards me, please take a step back, because that is my family you are talking about.” (taken from katindonesia.tumblr.com/post/129467015440/ignorance)

Questions I have gotten from some Indonesians include, “Do all Americans hate us?” “Do they think I am a terrorist?” As I said at the beginning of this post, I spend a lot of time wondering how my students and friends here would be treated if they came to the United States. I spend time reading the things people from back in the States post on Facebook. Although I rarely see someone post something explicitly Islamophobic, I sometimes see my “liberal” and “tolerant” friends posting some meme comparing Republicans to Muslims as a way to disparage them or some passive aggressive joke implying that Muslims as a whole are extreme, or that Islam is some kind of static, blanket belief system with no diversity or subtlety. I think back to those two idiots at the bar in Seoul.

Sometimes my students tell me that they want to come to America. I look at their smiling faces and think of how genuinely excited most of them are to see me and talk to me. I want to be able to tell all of them that if they went to my country, they would be accepted and loved as much as they have accepted me. I want to tell them that my country is great and beautiful and that they could travel there proudly as Muslims without being harassed or garnering suspicion. I want to tell them that Americans would be curious about them and ready to learn from them. I want to promise them all these things. And I do think they probably would be welcomed and loved and treated well by most people. I have to have faith that the majority of my countrymen would treat my students as the beautiful individual people they are and not as potential criminals or ticking time bombs. I must believe that most Americans would accept their religion as a part of their unique identities, not as a character flaw that needs to be corrected.

I need to trust that most Americans are smarter and better than the sickening phobia tainting our politics and rhetoric, that most Americans are open to learning and accepting, that most Americans would give my Muslim students a chance to teach them about themselves, and that most Americans want to move closer and closer to the ideals of freedom and tolerance on which our nation was founded. I am the only American my students and most of my community has ever met. I am representing our country. To consider that the alternative might be true, that our phobia of them might be stronger than our tolerance, would make me ashamed to represent our country to them.

 So, to my friends and family back home, I ask you to examine some of the beliefs you might have. If there are any that wouldn’t make me proud to walk into my Muslim Indonesian students’ classrooms and represent America to them, then I ask you to take some time to think about whether those beliefs have come from a place of love and logic or one of irrational fear and hate.