More than forty years ago, the idea of The Center for Cross-Cultural Study was born of an adventure that lead to a discovery.
The adventure was our first visit to an unknown country - Mexico- with our first baby in a 1951 Ford. After surviving the lesser adventures of your typical road trip--car break-down, running out of cash--we ended up by chance in a little town, where we could rent a tiny house in a garden where lilies grew about eight feet tall, and just sit still for a while. Then began the discovery.
First was language: we both had taken second-year Spanish in college, but we found that the people of Mexico did not speak our textbook Spanish. So we had to listen and learn from them, outside the typical classroom. (They were glad to speak to us--but at full speed!) Happily, they were very patient with our frequent no entiendo’s and our many questions. We too had to learn how to be patient and to see things the way our neighbors did. That was the key to discovery and eventually, to lifetimes of cross-cultural study.
Gradually we came to discover in our new neighbors a very high degree of honor and generosity that we did not as often find at home. We came to see their obvious differences from our culture, not as defects or curiosities, but as mainstays of a basically different, yet balanced value system.
This kind of knowledge is the key to better relations between people, whether one-to-one, in business negotiations, or in making peace between nations in this intensely small world.
