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Consider a new born baby who had been cocooned in mother’s womb for nine months suddenly ejected to the world.
People welcome the new born with joy, smiles, prayers and sweet talks but the “new member” cries and smiles in the process of socializing with the new world over time.
The above best illustrates Culture shock when people migrate from one culture to the other.
Culture itself offers solutions to the problems of living as it evolves from one generation to the other.
Culture shock represents a kind of discomposure migrants experience when they found themselves in a different clime from their primary abode such as new way of life and different set of attitudes.
Migration can be exciting and intriguing, It could also be harrowing.
Horizon Unknown.com lists five stages of Culture Shock to include:
- The Honeymoon stage when everything looks fascinating. And that is a stage a migrant is enthralled by their new destination. New foods, sights to behold, new people and other attractions but it is ephemeral and is quickly replaced with;
- Hostility and Irritability: It rubs quickly and fully on migrants by way of system that appears counter to logic and common sense and people are bound to accept.
- Gradual adjustment sets in after hostility and irritability. Adjustment stage in migrants vary; some assimilate as soon as they settle down, it takes a while in others.
- Adaptation stage is more of acceptance. Adopting and living with new realities of new way of life. It is instructive to stage that some migrants never get to the stage of holistic assimilation of the new culture they found themselves.
- Re-entry Travel Culture Shock
There are other sysmptoms Culture shock which are inexhaustible in this discourse but a mere mention helps.
Irritation. Feeling of isolation, helplessness and loneliness. Others are mood swings. Being home sick and sleeping problem.
Imagine a situation when an African father hitherto used to calling the shots on standard behaviors rooted in rich African values now having to walk the eggshells on kids to avoid trouble and recourse to breaking the law.
Is it not weird that parents who are suppossed to know the deeper pathologies of their ward are restricted by rules and laws that eventually lead to immorality and undesired criminal consequences? And suddenly, the law enforcers now come in to regulate a situation that could have been nipped in the bud if the rules had been made a bit stricter?
Is this not the reason some father and male spouse commit murder and go ahead to commit suicide even though it is totally reprehensible and unacceptable a behaviour? Frustrated and helpless and wanting to maintain the pride and values cherished back home, they are tempted to do the extreme.
At a standstill, it is a line of wisdom to beat a retreat if the forefront is uncertain and laced with thorns that cause unhealable sore.
The golden rule is to accept the laid down set of rules while applying the efficacy of your own to the extent the law allows.
- the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone when they are suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes.”jet lag, culture shock, altitude sickness; we struggle to get to grips with this, our first morning in South America”
