Universal Gestures

          There are four main gestures/behaviors to avoid in Africa that we, as westerners, find completely socially acceptable. To read more on the four click here. The four main thing not to do while in Africa include somethings that might be intuitive, like respecting an elder and not getting into disagreements with them. But others may be less intuitive, such as not giving the thumbs up or not letting the soles of your feet face someone while talking to them.

            The dissonance in the way African (and of course I’m generalizing here) cultures, and western cultures behave is very interesting to study. There are some very good reasons behind not using a left hand to greet someone or pass an item to someone with his/her left hand. It stems from a desire to be healthful because the left hand is what is referred to as the unclean hand. The left hand is used for personal hygiene and the right hand is reserved for greeting and shaking hands with other people.

            What struck me most is the stark difference in meaning between the gesture of giving someone the thumbs up. I always thought of the thumbs up as the universal sign for doing a good job, yet just an ocean away it’s considered to be equal to the middle finger in America. The difference in communication between cultures constructs a barrier between two people.

          Fonzie from Happy Days is pictured in the above picture giving his signature thumbs up. There is nothing the slightest bit threatening about Fonzie in this photo to us, yet we see a change in the way people feel as we move across cultures.

            Smiling was thought to be the universal language in the 1990s, but there are plenty of people, such as Dr. Warren M. Krutchick and Erin Cooper who would vehemently argue against that. Smiling in places like Thailand or China emotion is not expressed through a smile, but more through eyes.While Thailand and Africa are not the same thing, it's still important to understand that cultures are different and communicating with people from different cultures can be difficult.

           African gestures vary from American gestures in a big way and when communicating with Africans needs to be very cautious. Offending the people you're talking to in a village can make a good trip poor. It is important to do your research before traveling to another place because as we know: a smile is NOT the same in every language. 

Communication Through the Ages

Halfway through the quarter and struggling to finish my college applications, I’m think about what I want to communicate about myself in a single 500 word essay. But here’s the thing: I communicate differently than my parents and grandparents. I find myself reading more than talking, yet I have less patience to sit down and read a book than watch a movie or binge watch a TV show. I can maintain a conversation all day over text, yet when I have a chance to call or talk to the same person we run out of things to say in fifteen minutes. This generation has gotten used to slow and long forms of communication rather than short and quick.

My parents on the other hand like short quick forms of communication such as e-mail and short phone conversations. My parents were both born in the middle of the sixties, and grew up in the seventies and eighties. The cell phone wasn’t widely used until the eighties and the first phone with a full keyboard didn’t come out until 1997. Now, texting is a staple in the society, but my parents were already parents by the time the first cell phone came out.

My grandparents are different still. They prefer long drawn out phone conversations hearing about every aspect of a person’s life. When I talk to them over the phone they like to hear what has been going on in my life, all of my life, sine we last talked. It can be over a month since we last talked and they want to hear everything I’ve done in fine detail. It’s interesting how the different generations communicate.

When a college admissions officer reads my essay they will read it through a different lens than my peers, and probably closer to the way my parents would read my essay. I now understand the importance of getting many different perspectives on my essay. I don’t want to have a slow, drawn out communication. I should shoot for a more all-encompassing picture of who I want to show the colleges I am. I get one shot to make the right impression, so I need to make it great. So far, for each essay I’ve had three sets of eyes look at it: two being from my parents’ generation and one peer. I can’t communicate what I want to say in my style. My style is a conversation. That’s how I prefer to get across my ideas. That comes from being a teenager.

A strategy I have used is to have a mock conversation with my mom about what I want to say. Getting across what I want to say over my words becomes so much easier when I’m able to talk out what I want to say rather than write it out and have to delete what I had previously written. It’s my way of pre-writing without writing.

I talk about everything I do before I do it. I’m in the generation of oversharing, it’s what we do. We want to stand out and be our own special snowflake, but we don’t want to do the work that goes along with it (e.g. pre-writing).