So-What #3

    I have a better understanding of the actions that I have seen or that I have encountered over the course of my service-learning project with my refugee family. On the first blog about the situations I encountered I talked about how the families still don't speak English very well and how the little boy who came over kept interrupting us trying to teach them English, and we couldn't tell him to leave. I think that this action just was how they do things in their culture, they are very welcoming with quests and the mother, Aye-Mya didn't want to tell him to leave or to be quiet because that is seen as rude he was just having fun. Also, another thing that we encountered was when the mother was breast-feeding out in the open and we looked at that as being "wrong" or "not right" in our culture because typically when mothers breast feed in the U.S they do it in private or when no one is around. I would see this concept of what I was feeling in my mind as "ethnocentrism" because I thought what she was doing wasn't necessarily right just because that is not what we do in the U.S. which is judgemental on my part because they are from a different culture and I should have known that they do things differently in their culture.
    Our family still doesn't speak very good English but I do think that we helped them a lot because they have showed progress in things like counting money, shapes, colors, emotions and labeling household items. I also think that now after doing this service project and encountering these situations with the families my attitude is more ethnorelative rather than ethnocentric. Overall, I think that I may have gone into this service hours not very open-minded and my "attitude" wasn't very culturally sensitive. I analyzed that during the visit that the little boy was there interrupting or what we thought to be as interrupting he was just a little boy saying what any little boy would do in that situation. He also was helping us out with translating the words and things we were trying to say, so in the end I think I should have been more thankful rather than annoyed or bothered by him.