Month: December 2020

Saint Petersburg, Russia is a fascinating and beautiful city to visit today, but the first time I went there, it was more of a challenging adventure.  In 1990 the Soviet Union was on its last legs but still a reality. Leningrad, as it was still known at the time, was a city of stark contrasts: the world-renowned Kirov Ballet and long lines for scarce basic foods.  The opulent palaces of Peter and Catherine the Great and monotonous stretches of Khrushchev-era apartment blocks.  Many of my photos, though taken with color film, seemed to have turned out in black and white when developed.

I travelled there for 18 days in July 1990, accompanied by a work colleague and a dozen energetic U.S. university students, as part of a cultural exchange program.  Our project was to help rebuild and restore a church, formerly a Russian Orthodox cathedral but long ago closed down by the government and converted into a factory making iron fences.  Now it was reverting to its original function, and we were to work alongside a crew of local parishioners to resurrect the historic building.  This was an unglamorous construction project that promised back-breaking labor, long days, and austere living conditions.  The team had been carefully selected for their maturity and their construction expertise.  (Let’s pause so that those who know me well can have a chuckle over my deficiencies in both areas.)

We were paired up and assigned to stay in the homes of normal Russian families for the 18 day project, in order to have a taste of typical daily life there.   My colleague Roger and I were assigned to stay in the apartment of Vera, a 70 year old widow.  Vera had worked for 40 years (and counting) in the same job in a factory making steam irons.  She had lived for the same period of time in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a huge building in a sprawling urban housing complex.  The apartment consisted of a tiny entrance hall, a miniature kitchen, a miniscule bathroom, and a crowded room that was both living room and bedroom.  (Did I mention that it was a small apartment?)   Vera gave up the biggest room for the comfort of her honored guests and slept on a hard bench in her kitchen for our entire stay.   

Looking back on the experience, dozens of memories flood my mind, but all pale in comparison to the kidney stone.

[Unsolicited Personal Information]

It’s not something to be proud of, but I have experienced over 30 kidney stone “episodes” in my lifetime.  Being precocious, I had the first when I was eight years old, an almost unheard of phenomenon).  The rest have occurred as an adult.  I have had one removed by major surgery, one by exploding it with sound waves, two by extraction through an “available passage”, and the rest exiting through said passage on their own, but not without dragging their feet.  (Male readers feel free to shudder now.)

[Free Physiology Lesson]

A kidney stone is like a silent time bomb, forming in the kidney, perhaps lying dormant for months or years, and then deciding to attack when least expected.  The “attack” occurs when this spiny clot of minerals moves from the kidney down through an 18- inch-long tube roughly the diameter of one of those red coffee stirring straws.  The pain occurs when the stone is moving or blocking the passageway and can be agonizing. It can come and go over days or weeks, sometimes stopping as quickly as it started.  But I digress…

It is summer in Saint Petersburg, when the sun rises at 5:00am and it is still dusk as the clock approaches midnight.  We are six days into the renovation project.  Since our group is early in the lineup of multiple U.S. university groups scheduled to work on this renovation project, we are doing dirty, physical labor.  Our days consist of busting up concrete and carrying it out in buckets, moving tons of twisted scrap metal from one huge pile into another area 100 yards away, and working on homemade ladders in a basement under the dim but harsh glare of bare light bulbs.  I survive by daydreaming about what it would be like to be on the final work team, months in the future, with their cushy jobs, touching up the trim paint and vacuuming lint off the newly laid carpet.

After a few days, we begin to feel more like locals, commuting during rush hour by subway 45 minutes each way to the worksite by packed, returning home exhausted, dirty and hungry.  The evening menu in our hosts’ homes consists of whatever is available that day in the market.  For Roger and me it was potatoes and greens yesterday, and tonight it is boiled eggs, carrots, and a piece of bread.  Vera announces apologetically that, as is typical each summer, the authorities turn off the hot water to each building for the next 10-14 days for systems repairs.  For a warm bath, we must heat water in a kettle on the gas stove to add to the frigid water from the bathtub faucet.

Vera is kind and sweet and talkative.  She chatters away in Russian, even though we have not progressed past the “Hello/Goodbye/Please/Thank you” level of language mastery.  We actually get on quite well, communicating by a combination of Charades and Pictionary, and by looking up key words in the Russian/English dictionary and thrusting it out for the other party to see.  Vera has an ancient hardback dictionary, pages yellowed, that must have been published when Lenin was still in short pants.

We chat in this manner after dinner and then retire to start the laborious process of getting clean.  We make numerous trips back and forth to the kitchen to carry the large kettle of heated water to the tub.  Afterwards we go to our room to read and relax.  Vera, a modest and devoutly religious woman, stays in the kitchen, which is perhaps fifteen feet away from where we are, where she spends the last hour of her evening reading the Bible and praying (audibly).  When we retire, it is after 11:00 but still light outside, and there are no curtains to trick our body clocks into realizing that it is bedtime.  Roger had won the daily coin toss and is sleeping in the single bed, and I am on the small, lumpy couch.

We are just drifting off to sleep when it hits me – the all-too-familiar pain in the side and back.  As the pain intensifies, I whisper, “Psst!  Roger!  You won’t believe this, but I think I’m having a kidney stone attack!”  Roger, himself a card-carrying member of the KSVA (Kidney Stone Veteran Association), springs excitedly into action.  After a quick search, he brings me the strongest painkiller we have between us – Acetaminophen.  Great – This is like fending off a charging rhino with a dinner fork.  Within minutes I am nauseated, sweating, and groaning in pain.

As I lie there in this strange foreign city, I wonder if this is another Big One that will require medical attention.  Perhaps you remember reading the stories about the state of medical care in the Soviet Union at that particular time.  Multiple-use needles and IVs, unsanitary conditions, shortages of doctors and medicines – hospitals were often dangerous places to be.  Patients often had to scrounge on the black market to buy their own medicines, dressings, and other supplies to bring with them to the hospital.  And with few international flights in and out at this time, I’m not going to make it home quickly, even if I try. Panic sets in. [Author’s Note: Russia medical care is of course radically different now.]

Medic Roger, calling upon his experience, reminds me that some pain relief can be attained by lying in a tub of very hot water.  By now, I am ready to lie in boiling tree sap if it will help.  This procedure, of course, will involve the complicated process of heating water again (damn you, local authorities!), so we have no choice but to wake Vera, who is asleep in the kitchen.  Then we must explain to her what is going on.  Roger hurriedly opens her dictionary and points to the word for “kidney”.  She can no doubt hear me groaning in the other room.  Roger puts on the water to heat.

 Thirty minutes later, here is the scene:

Vera is doing what she must feel to be the most helpful thing she can contribute:  She is kneeling in the corner of the kitchen, head covered, praying fervently (in Russian, of course.)

I am lying naked in the bathtub in the tiny bathroom in a slowly-deepening pool of hot water, experimenting with an adapted form of Lamaze breathing.

Roger is making repeated trips to the stove for more water.  He has now pressed into service every available saucepan, skillet and roasting pan.  As he comes in to pour, I contort my body to dodge the cascade of scalding water to avoid severe burns on sensitive body parts.  The floor is slippery from splashes and drips along the way.

On one pour from the kettle I am not quick enough, and some scalding water hits my leg.  I yowl in pain. Instantly we are both simultaneously struck by the absurdity and humor of the situation, and we both start laughing uncontrollably.  Roger is laughing so hard that he slides his broad 6’3” frame down the wall to a sitting position on the wet floor.  I can picture Vera, in the next room, hearing these two strange men and the moaning and laughing and splashing in her bathroom, praying, “Lord, what have you gotten me into?”

Eventually, the pain lets up enough for us to go to bed, and I fall fitfully asleep around 3:00am.

 Strangely, the pain subsides almost as quickly as it hits, and it usually recurs only after I go to bed at night.  So this is our pattern for the next three or four days: painful attacks at night but mostly pain free days.  Because I am not sleeping until 3 or 4 in the morning, I sleep later and then join the work team at lunch and work all afternoon.  I think that the U.S. students understand and believe my explanation, but I sense that our Russian co-workers are sceptical.  Through an interpreter, I’ve tried to explain this strange cyclical illness to them.  “How convenient”, they must be thinking.  “Must be some Lazy Capitalist disease.”  Anyway, after a few days, I am “cured” as the stone stops its downward passage – I will have no more attacks for the rest of the trip, although I know my ordeal is not over yet, because IT is still in there somewhere…

As we prepare to depart at the end of the trip, we are talking to Vera about the experience.  She communicates that she is glad I am better, and that she has been praying for me.  She opens her dictionary and points to a Russian word.  I read across to the English translation, and it says “liver”.  All this time she has been praying for the wrong organ, but I assume that God figured it out.

Postscript…

It is four months later in November, in Dallas, Texas.  I have had no recurring bouts of pain for weeks, but I have seen my urologist, who has scheduled me the next morning to go to the hospital to scoop the stone out, even though I am in no pain at the moment. 

That evening, Cheryl and I are midway through a James Taylor concert when the “final assault” commences.  (I’m sure it must have been during the song “Fire and Rain”.)  Not wanting to spoil the evening, I tough it out.  Later that night, four months after that first attack half a world away, I will “pass” (as we euphemistically say) a kidney stone roughly the size of a raisin.

This is one of those classic “It’s terrible in the moment, but it’ll make a good story later” experiences.  And how appropriate a setting, I think now, that it happened in a city named for the Apostle Peter, whose name means literally “The Rock”.

It’s understandable if you don’t recognize the name Favell Lee Mortimer.  Had you lived in Victorian England, however, you might well have read Mrs. Mortimer’s books to your children at bedtime.  In her long career she wrote 16 children’s books and became a literary superstar in her day.  Her most famous book was The Peep of Day (1833), a religious primer for young children, which eventually sold at least a million copies in 38 languages.  Mrs. Mortimer’s writings were colored by the strict religious conventions of the day, and no doubt the effects of a miserably unhappy adult life had a strong impact on her world view as well: In a 1901 biography her niece recalled that her doctor had said that she was the only person he ever met who wished to die.

Between 1839 and 1853, she published three books on geography for young readers, the first of which was The Countries of Europe Described, followed by two volumes that featured Asia, Africa, Australia and America.  In these books, Mrs. Mortimer writes authoritatively, with very specific descriptions of peoples and places.  Her pronouncements are dogmatic and judgmental, to the point of scornfulness.  Her descriptions are almost universally negative.  For instance, she writes that “Spaniards are not only idle, they are very cruel”.  Also, “No people in Europe are more clumsy and awkward than the Portuguese, and their language is not as pretty as Spanish because it is spoken in harsh and squeaking tones.”  Turks are “so grave that they look wise.  But how can lazy people be wise?  They like to spend their time in eating opium, sipping coffee, and sitting still.”  Of India (Hindustan) she writes “It is a miserable thing to be a Hindoo lady.  They are not taught anything and spend most of their time in idleness, sauntering about and chattering nonsense.”

As for Egyptians, “It is a rare thing in Egypt to speak the truth.  There is a story of an Egyptian who spoke the truth so constantly that his countrymen began to call him ‘the Englishman’.”   The Italians are “ignorant and wicked, caring more for beautiful things than useful things’.  And “it is dreadful to think what number of murders are committed in Italy.”  After painting a positive picture of Belgians, she sadly must add, “Alas, they worship idols.  They are Roman Catholics.”

Her characterizations are put forth with a persuasive style and level of specificity that must have engendered in her readers the confidence that this expert knew what she was talking about.  Now, here is the amazing part:  Mrs. Mortimer had set foot out of her native England only once before writing these books, when she was in her teens!  She had never even visited Wales, whose border was only a few miles from her English home.  She gleaned her exhaustive “knowledge” not from personal experience with other cultures but rather from a variety of available books, many of them already decades old.

A first reading of her books elicits amusement at the absurd and uninformed descriptions of different cultures, but then an unease settles in, as two things dawn on us:  First is the realization that most of her young readers would not ever have opportunity to travel and would have formed their perceptions of other countries through Mrs. Mortimer’s books.  Information sources were limited, so these “non-fiction” works would have helped shape many a Victorian world view.

The second realization is that, to a lesser degree, and though we don’t put them in print, each of us may view the world through the lenses of broad and sometimes inaccurate stereotypes.

What is stereotyping?  A common definition is “Ascribing specific characteristics and behavioral traits to individuals based upon their membership in a certain group.”  They put people in boxes and minimize individual differences.  Stereotyping is a universal phenomenon. 

What is the difference in a stereotype and a generalization?  There are similarities but significant differences.  We generalize when we group information and experiences together to form logical categories.  Our brains take shortcuts – and lots of them – to reach answers quickly, for expediency and effectiveness.  This serves to simplify how we perceive and think about our world and make that process more efficient.  We make these unconscious generalizations constantly, and this helps keep us sane.  If we didn’t wake up each morning with a certain degree of predictability about what to expect, we could not function.  But the downside is the formation of biases, which can then lead to sterotyping.

But let’s focus on conscious generalizations we make about our fellow human beings, especially those that are different from us.  It is normal to draw certain conclusions about others, but a generalization should be based upon knowledge – commonly-held and corroborated information and personal experience.  Generalizations are descriptive, whereas stereotypes are evaluative.  Generalizations are provisional and fluid, open to modification by subsequent information and experience; stereotypes are inflexible and often not swayed by reality.  They become calcified and unconscious over time, as we selectively notice anything that supports them and ignoring evidence that refutes them.

So, when uninformed stereotypes warp our view of others and lessen our interpersonal effectiveness, what can we do to change our perspective?  Here are four suggestions:

1.  Acknowledge that you have biases that can lead to stereotypes.  Self-awareness of our own biases is an important first step.  Reflect upon the roots of your stereotypes.

(1)  Social Identity.  Social identities are labels that people use to categorize or identify themselves and/or others as members of specific groups. Some common social identities include: nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, generation, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, political affiliation, relationship status, profession, and socioeconomic status.  Social identities are powerful because as humans, we categorize ourselves and each other into groups along social identity lines. This categorization often lays the foundation for bias, stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. 

(2)  Popular culture and media.  Mrs. Mortimer’s books were based on published information, the popular culture of the day.  Many of our views are shaped by the broad stereotypes prevalent in movies, television and literature.  And others’ views of U.S. culture are likewise shaped by what they see in movies and television.  I recently spoke to a group of university students from 20 countries, most newly-arrived in the U.S.  I told them I was originally from Texas and asked them what came to mind when they thought of Texans.  Their responses included “They ride horses.” (I drive a Honda but have ridden in a Mustang.)  They wear cowboy hats and boots.” (Not really a good look for me.)  “They live in a hot place.”  (True, but I can’t be held responsible for the weather.)  “They are ignorant hicks.”  (This observation from the one U.S. American in the group.)  “They live on ranches.”  (OK, one out of five was accurate for me.)  I then asked them if any of them had been to Texas or had met a Texan.  No hands went up.   Obviously, their impressions were based upon the 80’s TV show “Dallas” and generations of Western movies.

(3)  Limited personal experience.  Ask yourself:  On how many personal encounters or first-hand experiences am I basing my view of this particular group?  How many members of this group have I interacted with and gotten to know on more than a surface level?  Several years ago, one of my friends took his first trip to Rome and stayed for three days. This experience evidently equipped him with the expertise to make a number of authoritative statements about what “Italian people are like”.  A research scientist who based his conclusions on a sample of 2 or 3 would be laughed out of the lab, yet many of us make pronouncements about a country or culture group based upon a very narrow sample of first-hand experience.

2.  Practice making fewer universal statements and use more disclaimers. 

Begin to view stereotypes as provisional and open to modification.  Listen to your language about different others: If you find yourself describing groups with words such as “all” and “always”, or even “most”, stop and reflect.  Stereotypes may be representative of many people in a given culture or group, but by no means everyone.  After all, a particular Korean is like most Koreans in some ways, like some Koreans, and like no other Korean who has ever lived.

Over time, you may observe common characteristics and behaviors among members of a group, and it’s OK to use that as a tentative starting point, as long as you’re willing to allow for individual differences and abandon the stereotype when it doesn’t fit in a given situation.  For instance, after numerous visits to Helsinki and dozens of interactions with people from Finland, I observe that Finns tend to be a fairly reserved lot, not given to being overly expressive and “out there” interpersonally.  But then I met Ralf, who is boisterous, expressive, and humorous.  And I know that there are other Ralfs in Finland – after all, I’ve met only a relative handful out of the millions of people in Finland, so I‘d better be very cautious about trying to describe “all Finns”.  So, start mentally exchanging your stereotypes for generalizations which you acknowledge as “first best guesses” open to revision. 

3.  Continue the lifelong process of building up your personal database of information about different groups and cultures.

 It is ignorance of cultures, geography, and history that fuels an unhealthy dependence of stereotypes.  Sometimes we just don’t know no better!  (This is how all Texans talk.) The more information we can access, the less we are prone to stereotype.  That information comes from two sources:

(1)  The published body of information on countries, cultures, and other social categories.  There exists a vast reservoir of reliable data that will help you make informed generalizations about others.  Understanding these various social dimensions help us make generalizations about how people may be/act, but we must constantly remind ourselves that individuals may or may not conform to the generalization.  There are also rich learnings to be had by studying current events from a variety of sources, articles, some popular books, and many other written sources.

(2)  First-hand experience with others.  The more personal encounters you have with people from a different group, the more your stereotypes fade, indeed become unnecessary.  You may have a provisional generalization at the ready, but you begin to more readily see each person first as a unique individual and second as a member of a certain group.

Start with an evaluation of your own Cross-Cultural Comfort Zone.  How often do you create and take advantage of encounters with “different others”?  For some, it is admittedly not an easy thing to do.  But what if you decided to push fear and inertia aside and take more initiative to broaden your interactions with people who are not like you?  It’s not like you have to go out of your way in today’s increasingly global world.  Our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods reflect a rich diversity of differences.

4.  Don’t collude with others in perpetuating inaccurate and harmful stereotypes and prejudices.

There is no simple formula for practicing this.  How do you do this without coming across as holier-than-thou or judgmental?  This is not to say that you become overly uptight or that we can’t have a sense of humor. First of all, don’t be cowed by talk of political correctness, which is a false equivalence in regard to this topic. The path of least resistance is to just sit in silence.   One helpful thing you can do is to regularly share our firsthand experiences that refute the stereotypes and prejudices and hope that it is contagious.

As we look around and see the increasing polarization and divisiveness around us, ask yourself, “What can I do to be a positive role model and a force for change?

         

Mrs. Mortimer