The Duncan Process

I’ve discussed this with many of my companion trainees, and it seems to be enough of a consensus that I’m going to talk about it as universal truth.

Reality for a Peace Corps Trainee (I can’t speak yet for the full-on volunteers) is quite different from that which we were accustomed to back in the States. That is to say that what we would have considered a normal existence before coming to Morocco no longer exists, and our current reality is actually an alternate reality of what is really real.

Allow me to explain. Have you ever dreamt that you were in your house (doing something, it’s not really important what), except when you stopped to think about it – either during or after the dream – you realized that what you had accepted as being your house without question during the dream was in fact completely different from your actual house? That’s what life is like here. My day is really the most typical of days imaginable: I wake up, eat breakfast, walk to school, study for a while, eat lunch, study some more, spend some time at the after-school center, come home, do some homework, eat dinner, maybe watch tv, chat with my neighbors and family, and then go to sleep. The regularity of days is interrupted by the occasional excitement and I have a regular group of friends and associates that I see enough of the time to be able to take slightly (in a good way) for granted.

Except that every once in a while, when I stop to think about it, nothing feels normal. And I wonder why. Why, if I live the Norman Rockwell of routines do I feel like I’m actually in the Twilight Zone instead of the Saturday Evening Post? The answer, I think, is symbols. This occurred to me only the other day when I was walking to school, but I now believe that reason that everything occasionally feels just slightly off is that, like a dream, though I am doing my usual actions, I’m not doing them with or in or about or around or to any of the things I used to do them with, in, about, around, and to (among other prepositions). Just like the house in my dream, my brain excepts Morocco as normal because this is where I am functioning, and where I’m functioning should be, by definition, my home, but when I pause to evaluate my reality I realize that nothing about "my home" is familiar to me.

The most obvious disconnect is language, but by virtue of its being so obvious it’s probably not most jarring. That distinction would probably go to the smells of the street (both pleasant and unpleasant), the dynamic between salesman and client, the relative evenness of a sidewalk or flight of stairs, the artistic quality of a tv show, the temperature change between day and night, or the taste of water – all things that we take so completely for granted and would never consider being possible to do in any other way. For example, my host mother this evening cooked spaghetti, which looked just like any spaghetti you’ve ever eaten, but tasted like nothing you could hope to find on Federal Hill (a reference to the Italian district of Providence for those of you who may not understand). Such a typical action (especially if you know how often I eat pasta) that was totally unlike my typical reality.

These typical actions are, however, the signposts by which we guide our reality. Just like the dream house, we often (here in Morocco) carry on according to the macro-signals of reality – eating, talking, seeing things – without noticing the micro-textures – eating tagine with our hands, talking in Darija, seeing barren desert mountains and flocks of sheep – that give normalcy to the actions we can do anywhere.

This is probably not new psychology, but if they haven’t already named this stage of what I’m sure is "culture shock," then I want to call it the Duncan Process. I think it has a nice ring to it.