A North American living abroad writes a blog entry as a way of venting, repeatedly using the tool of sarcasm to describe an event or chain of events that has either a) frustrated him/her or b) he/she found strange/funny in his/her cross-cultural environment. A national finds the entry, reads it and is offended by it. Relationships become strained and the reconciliation, if possible, ends up requiring infinitely more thought and energy than was put into the initial 150-word entry.
This is a situation that has occurred, from what I gather, several times with MCC’s international service workers. It is also something we all want to avoid. We have our blogs to give family/friends at home a glimpse into what is going on in our lives. We use our blogs to avoid the impersonal mass e-mail (that many end up deleting without reading) and also to save some time on individual communication. It also gives readers a great opening line; when they do decide to send us a message—“I love your blog,” “I was just reading your blog,” “Your blog is so interesting,” …. People can check it if they want according to their own schedule.
Personally, I want to keep our small core of readers and a good way to do that is to entertain them (make them laugh). I use sarcasm that can border on hurtful in order to reach this end. For me, laughing at the uncomfortable situations is a way of coping and it’s not my intention to say that everyone here is “like this.” I have come to realize that many cultures don’t put as much emphasis on sarcasm as maybe I am accustomed to. The response I envision myself hearing is: “we aren’t ALL like that.” And essentially “hasn’t anything good happened?”
Our blog entries tend to be about trips that we take and strange situations in which we find ourselves. Please don’t take this to mean that all we do is travel to exotic places or that we are perpetually in strange situations (even though the frequency is exponentially greater than it was in
For me, my “work” is usually quite interesting; but writing about it constantly could border on boring: for both me the writer and you the reader. I won’t speak for Laura but I think she would agree with this as well. In any case, we hope we haven’t offended anyone and will continue to try to be culturally sensitive when writing our blogs.
Dave
