The Impact Of A New Culture
As a 17-year-old, I thought I had my whole life figured out. However, unpredictable events that might turn your whole life upside down. When my parents first told me we were moving to another country, I had no reaction as I could not believe it was happening. Three years after leaving Brazil, I feel like I am where I am supposed to be.
At first, what scared and shocked me the most were the differences and similarities between so many distinct cultures. During my SPC1017 class, one of the topics that called my attention was “intercultural communication and how it can affect people’s communications with each other.”
Culture is the system of shared attitudes, values, beliefs and norms that guide what is considered proper among an identifiable group of people. While cultural shock, according to professor Igor Klyukanov, is the psychological discomfort we feel when we engage in a new situation.
The first experience I had with cultural shock was coming to a country where the language spoken was not my maternal language. Trying to express yourself in a country, in which the language spoken is not your first, can be very complicated. Additionally, as funny as it may sound, I had no idea what being a “freshman” or a “junior” meant until my third month in high school. Whenever someone asked me which one I was, I always said I was a “freshman” instead of a “junior,” because I thought it was related to the fact that I was a new student and not to the grade I was in.
In the beginning, finding the right words for the right moments was hard. Miami is full of Hispanic and Latino descendants, and Portuguese and Spanish have similar words, but many of them had no meaning in other languages other than Portuguese. One example is the word “saudade” which in free translation means a longing or melancholic feeling of deeply missing someone, somewhere or something.
As I started having more conversations, people would tell me I had a strong accent which I first saw as a negative characteristic I needed to get rid of. No matter how much I tried to get rid of it, I realized my accent will always be a part of me. It showed people where I was from which sometimes ended up having a great impact.
Food, language, accents and a lot of other things shocked me, but what impacted me the most was how Americans do not take advantages of all the opportunities given to them. Life in Brazil is hard, having access to a good system of public education is impossible and it’s scary to think that you may lose your life in less than 15 seconds. While in America, even though we may not feel safe sometimes, think that public education is horrible and that health care systems are expensive, we do not know how life in a third world country really is.
