"Developed" Country Adjustments

Well folks, it had to come.

Moving always has its ups and downs. There's the excitement of a new and sometimes exotic place, mixed with the regret of leaving the familiarity and comfort of where you were. Writing from my relocations to Ghana or Uganda, or during my travels in Africa and Asia, there were significant cultural and logistical differences to "home" that required some adjusting to. Many of you heard about the bus rides with chickens and goats, the gastronomic adventures, and the forays with wild animals. There were power outages, lynch mobs and underpaid authority figures to reckon with, but over the past few years, Brent and I began to "get used" as the Ugandans would say, to how to live, and even thrive, under these new sets of rules. I dislike over generalisations, but there seem to be currents of similarity that unite high-context cultures, that differ from low-context cultures (for more info on what the heck I'm talking about, see http://www.via-web.de/273.html, or google "high context cultures"). While we have been back in wealthy, western, low-context North America for nearly a year, I think the reverse adjustment was buffeted by the overwhelming familiarity of home. Now that we're in a new place, I'm aware of differences I hadn't noticed as starkly in Victoria, and my need to adjust to them.

Now, some aspects of re-adjusting to living in North America are wonderful! Daily cappuccinos (if you can afford them); timely, reliable transport; gyms, parks and a multitude of other ways to stay active; shopping options galore (see photo of my new sunglasses), and the variety of affordable international cuisine being some of them. However, the following aspects of life in a "developed", wealthy, western country have been less easy to adjust to...

1) Can I have my money please?

We'd heard about the US mortgage crisis, but since we don't own property I didn't think it affected us. Then we tried to buy groceries the other day and our new debit card was denied. As it turns out, the state of the US economy has generated a colossal number of fraudulent cheque writers, and as a result, many US banks, including ours, now put every cheque deposited on hold anywhere from 10 days to 8 weeks! Ouch!

2) Ugandan pedestrian rules

In Uganda the rules of the road are simple: the right of way goes to the biggest vehicle. Now while I was initially quite impressed with San Diegan drivers for courteously allowing merging traffic into their lane, I was more taken aback when stepping out on a crosswalk nearly got me flattened! So we've concluded that it's just these weird walking folk (i.e. pedestrians) that have the last right of way.

3) Begging Mr. Fix-It

In high-context cultures waiting becomes a way of life, sometimes elevated to the duration of an art form. But returning back to relatively punctual North America, I found my expectations switching back to minutes rather than hours or hours rather than days. So when we alerted our property manager to our inability to get into our mailbox, and a rather major privacy issue in our shower (which was also a security issue, and a reason that I won't elaborate until tomorrow when it's fixed), I thought they would have it fixed the next day...maybe two days if they were busy. Not the close to TWO WEEKS we've been waiting! And where in Uganda we could have just paid someone to get it done, here that gets into liability issues. Until the manager called today promising it would be done tomorrow, I was ready to fight liability with liability and resort to the American mantra of - let's SUE!

4) The poor here

After her first visit to Canada my former Ghanaian boss said, "the poor in Canada are much poorer than the poor in Africa, because they are alone. If you are poor in Africa, people don't blame you for being poor. In Canada, society shuns you." Working next door to Our Place downtown, I witnessed Victoria's intertwined mental health, substance abuse and homelessness issues daily, so I'm not sure why it is hitting me so hard in San Diego. But it is. Brent and I ventured downtown for the first time this weekend, and juxtaposed against stunning architecture, the ever-present palm fronds, and boutique stores, was the frequent smell of urine, and more than a few people living off the refuse of the rich. It was amazing how close and stark the disparity is in the richest country on earth.

5) Health Care?

Undoubtedly intertwined with #4, I am now living in the land of health-care-for-purchase. It's a strange concept for a Canadian, as I realised staring at a billboard of a kid with his arm in a cast, asking whether your health insurance would pay for that. Huh? Not get a cast when you break an arm because your health insurance doesn't pay for it? What?! I felt like I'd walked into an Orwellian future where something we take for granted has been bought out by big business. In a way, that's what happened for Americans a long time ago. Brent and I sat down to choose his/our benefit package last night and calculated that for basic health, vision and dental (of which his employer still pays around 60%), we'll be looking at premiums of between $350 and $400 a month! The worst part is that if/when we need medical care, we'll still be responsible for up to 50% of the cost. And Canadians have no idea of what health care really costs. The majority of (minuscule) expenses we have for health care are still so heavily subsidized by the government that the equivalent here would involve adding a lot of zero's. If you can handle Michael Moore's one-sided documentaries, see Sicko.

Well this wasn't meant to be a gripe fest, I am really liking San Diego! But it's also good to realise that sometimes a "developing" country's idiosyncrasies can seem comforting, and a sunny, beautiful city in the wealthiest country in the world still has its issues ;-)

To end on a happy note, here are some photos of SD's Gaslamp District, Horton Mall (no relation to Timmy), and the San Diegan skyline (complete with airplane landing).

Take care,

Jen