Diving In....in slow motion or, karibu Tanzania

Sometimes when people come back from assignments over seas or deployments to different cultures they reenter slowly and with support and guidance. What is sometimes called re-immersion therapy. Maybe to prevent or treat post traumatic culture shock. I am initiating a new preemptive treatment called

PRE -IMMERSION culture shock therapy. Its really quite simple. Go to the country your are about to be immersed in and just sit there. Don't do anything, just be with the new culture and its people. Forget your schedule, your appointments, your expectations. Just be there,in the now, in the moment. If its really a different place( like Tanzania) you will stand out and people , being universally inquisitive by nature, will be drawn to you. I did my first session in Dar esa Salaam( like Jerusalam) airport the other day on my way to Mwanza. My flight was repeatedly delayed and I spent 11 hrs just sitting in the departure terminal.We were never told why; its all part of the therapy. It's not a comfortable place, its noisy, hot and stinky and and there is no first class lounge or club and that is all part of the unproven therapeutic effect. People stare a little, little kids stare a lot and come up to you and sat" mzugu" Later on, around 10pm when all the other flights had left and there were only passingers on my flight left and the lights kept going off and on, we all bonded no matter what our race and culture and entered sort of a survivor mode. By this time the only lights working in the terminal were those soft yellow sodium lamps they use in the parking lots in places like Newark Airport. It created sort of a surreal sepia environment. When I am in that light for a while something happens to me and I enter sort of a slow motion world, as if I was traveling in hyperspace and time itself actually slows down ( try to figure that one out). Again, this is all part of the therapy. I, for one, was convinced we were never going to get out of there that night. I wasn't alone and as the minutes and hrs ticked by and the sepia sunk in we started little conversations and became a survivor tribe....an airport survivor tribe.

We finally took off into the African night in a twin engine propeller plane for a 2 hrs flight thru thunder storms, fear and doubt to Mwanza. When we landed we felt like we had survived together, no matter what your backround, race, creed, color or culture. After a total of 13 hours of "therapy" the last thing on my mind as I picked up my bags in Mwanza was culture shock. I, along with my new tribe, were aware of only the strong desires to get off our butts, get horizontal and fall asleep. See, I knew this would work......its all part of the the therapy.

Karibu (welcome to) Tanzania.