Well, I figured out how to use my own pictures to supplement each blog entry, so now there's an actual picture from Corvallis for this one. :-)

The past couple days I did a "trial run" with my malaria prophylaxis to see if I showed any of the bad side effects that some people get while on Doxycycline, and I think I made it through pretty well. No complications that I could tell! This whole trip is starting to seem pretty real now that I have done a trial run of anti-malaria medicine, taken pills to prevent against typhoid fever, gotten booster shots for various things, and even bought a mosquito net. It's pretty crazy to think that in just a few short weeks, I will be flying halfway (literally!) across the world to live at the base of the Himalayas for three months. And I think I figured out the time difference: Oregon and India are 12.5 hours apart (so when it is 8:00 pm on a Monday in Oregon, it is 8:30 am on a Tuesday in Dehradun, India.)

I (and the other people who I will be with in my program) participated in a web conference on Thursday to learn more about what we should expect when we get over there and about Child Family Health International, the organization we'll be working with. One thing I found rather interesting is something they called the "Culture Shock Cycle." The four stages they highlighted are (1) the honeymoon stage, where everything just seems so exciting; (2) the resistance stage, the part where the true harsh realities of the new culture start to be noticed, yet through rose-colored glasses of denial; (3) the humor stage, where the newcomer starts to see the underlying beauty in the new culture's ways of life; and (4) the comfort stage, where a feeling of belonging and the ability to fit in and mesh with the culture comes to fruition. It makes me wonder just how much time I will spend in each of these so-called phases and how long it will take me to get to that comfort stage. Will I ever get to that comfort stage? Two times in high school I had the chance to travel with my church to an impoverished part of Tijuana, Mexico, and I definitely experienced some culture shock through that experience. Getting ready for my first Mexico Mission trip, I didn't really think about the possibility of feeling some culture shock; it was never a big topic of conversation at our pre-trip meetings. I think people venturing to new areas naturally expect to be surprised a little bit by the new cultures they are heading into, but I know for me at least, I always just assume I will make the transition easily and will notice the cultural differences without necessarily being affected by them to a large extent. Well, during the web conference when the leaders started listing off the four stages of the culture shock cycle, it began to hit me that I will definitely be affected by the culture in India, and there's nothing I can do about it. After all, that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this international internship; I wanted to see and experience another way of life completely different than the one I know. I have no doubt I will get culture shock during my ten weeks in India. All I can do is embrace it, experience it, and let the natural culture shock cycle engulf me the way it has each of the past participants. It's all part of the experience...bring it on!