Friday, June 24, 2005

Brazil team prep - culture

Had a meeting with the Brazil team tonight (well those who were in town) [sidebar: I'm really worried that we are not going to be a team by departure time] and talked about culture. Specifically, what are the essential elements of American culture? What tangible items would you bring to another culture to symbolize those elements? Here is some of the list of elements of our culture they came up with:
- family
- extravagence
- de-stressing
- choices
- achievement
- efficiency
- being seen
- quality time
- comfort
- conformity
- multi-tasking

We took it one step further and asked them what are some elements of American Christianity that they could identify, and which ones of those are biblical. We also talked about how elements of a culture are not positive or negative, mostly. Sometimes, a percieved negative element of the culture is a positive one being misused, much like personal character attributes.

Doing this discussion was one of those ideas that just popped into my head about an hour before our meeting. And some people think this trip is soooo last minute. It turned out much better than I thought. This idea of elements of culture (I have now come to realize) is so huge, so important to talk about. I'm glad God popped this idea into my head.

On a slightly related note, in 6 weeks, SPACE missions has raised $13K.

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