Orientation: What I Learned

Diana has been bugging me to write about what I learned at the orientation. This is a question that have tried to answer several numerous times since we got back and I have struggled to come up with one. Now that I have had time to reflect on it, I think there are two reasons for that. First, the conference was long and intense, leaving little time to digest any of it at the time. Second, I was not really struck by any one thing as earth-shattering or life-changing, but instead a lot of little nuggets of truth and wisdom, making them harder to pinpoint. So, with all that being said, I think that I have come up with a few things that I learned at orientation.

1. Culture shock is real. I, of course, knew this already, but I did not have a firm grasp on how culture shock worked. Teri McCarthy (she has a new book coming out in dec) gave a great lecture on dealing with culture shock and laid it out very succinctly. I will not go into all of the details here (see below), but we decided that every time you move or enter a new place, you have to deal with the same symptoms. Whether you are new to Houston, TX or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, you can have a hard time communicating, you will get lost and get frustrated easily, and you miss the place you used to live. It is easy to slip into depression and never go outside again. And this will happen unless you can adjust, realize that things are what they are and repeat to yourself, "It's not good, it's not bad, it's just different" and you are on the road to recovery. Sounds so simple doesn't it?

2. The New Atheism. One of the speakers at the conference portion of the orientation was Elaine Storkey, a philosopher from the University of Oxford in England. She was clearly brilliant and very engaging, with some amazing stories. (Sidenote: she has her own Wikipedia page and a Facebook page, a nice mix of web-presence.) Her second lecture on Friday morning was about the New Atheism, a look at present-day atheism and how they are attacking Christianity and religion as a whole. It was a very interesting discourse on how atheism has turned away from science as its basis and become political. They still use science as a foundation, but it is no longer approaches religion scientifically, instead looking to convince everyone that religion is harmful (look at all the wars) and irrational (evolved beings don't need faith). Using these arguments and things like the Atheist Bus Campaign in England, atheists are trying to use the powers of persuasion instead of reason to convince people God does not exist. I found the talk extremely interesting and I feel better equipped to discuss books like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. If you want to know more, a good resource is: Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose.

Now check out these pictures!