This is not a whinge! It’s an attempt to put some flesh on “culture shock” and what it means to lose competence in your own culture. Here’s how it looked on one morning of our first week ‘home’ in Australia. (The tenses are all over the place – because that’s how it feels!)

Having signed up for a gym on a great EOFY sale, I was excited about my first workout. But when I got in the car (generously loaned to us by a CMS supporter) I couldn’t work out how to move the driver’s seat forward so my feet could reach the pedals comfortably. There was no bar. There were lots of buttons, but they had no labels to say what they did and none of them moved the seat forward when I touched them though some adjusted its position. So I drove to the gym a bit unnerved.

I kept watching for motorbike taxis, pedestrians, tuktuks but it was only cars. The cars drive so fast! “Concentrate Tam! And don’t pick up your phone!” And my car kept beeping at me! I think it’s a warning for when you’re getting close to something but it feels like a premature siren – I can see where the curb is without that insistent beep!

I arrived at the gym and scanned in. Everything beeps at you in Australia! The boys say “Everything is so high-tech!” and “Can’t you make the noise stop? It’s going all the time!” All is going well with the workout on my phone until it suddenly stops. I can’t message or make calls either – I must have made a mistake when I was trying to get onto a mobile plan. So, that’s the end of my workout, 15 minutes in. No endorphins for me today!

I’d planned to do the groceries on the way home. People are wonderful, bringing us meals, etc but there are a few things we need still. In hindsight, maybe I should have abandoned this as well because it was a lot of decisions to make solo. For example:

• We eat a lot of salad wraps. In Tanzania, we make the chapatis for them ourselves but here we will buy them. “Ooh, they come in multi-grain! Whoa, so expensive! Hmm, is it OK to get the generic? Will that be less nutritious? Wildly unethical? How many will we need? I have no idea what the shape of our week will look like.”
• It’s about to be kiddo no.1’s birthday. Not the first time it’s happened in the middle of a huge transition – I feel sorry for him, doing it without friends or favourite places to go, so I want to at least make him a decent cake. With… white sugar? brown sugar? raw sugar? caster sugar? In Tanzania, there’s just sugar and it doesn’t look the same as any of those! Which one do I get? Will it affect the end result or does it not matter greatly?
• We need some more toothpaste. I see 15 different types of Colgate and 2 different types of Sensodyne, but there’s no Whitedent with herbs (our go-to in Dar.) I find if it’s too minty it burns my mouth – which of the Colgates will be mild enough? And does that extra strip of gel really do anything? What about the charcoal? Is it just a gimmick? How does anyone navigate all this?

I tell my little boys all the time that mistakes are how we learn and that’s certainly the case here. I’m sure I’m not getting the best deal or making the most ethical choice or even buying what I really want. And that’s OK. It’s OK to make mistakes or bad decisions. When you know better, you do better, and we don’t know much yet. At least, that’s what I would have told myself, if I could rally my thoughts. But I don’t yet have the right clothes for the Adelaide winter and I’m so cold I’m shivering. It’s very overwhelming mentally and physically and I can’t think straight.

Then I get lost on the way home. I know I’m generally heading in the right direction but I can’t remember which road intersects with which and our new place (generously provided and furnished by CMS!) is right in the middle of some kind of triangle shape. But of course, without internet, I can’t use google maps to navigate myself home. There’s no street directory in the car and the streets are empty, a far cry from the Tanzanian version of stopping for a chat and directions every 500m! So there I am, alone, in a car I’m worried about driving, having missed my workout, the weight of a thousand decisions I’m sure I’ve made wrong pressing down on me, and I can’t get home. I start to panic…

These are the very early days of our adjustment to life in Australia. “Welcome home!” and “Welcome back!” to this foreign place where you are incompetent.

Most of the things I’ve mentioned here are relatively minor and can be fairly easily fixed. In another week or two, I will have sorted out the gym and I’m making it a priority to get a warm coat, and in a month or two I might have a better idea of what we will eat and where to source it. But initially, it’s a lot to get your head around all at once! And this is just the beginning, the very surface level adjustments.

Categories: Written by Tamie

Tagged as: culture adjustment culture shock Home Assignment repatriation transition

Tamie Davis

Tamie Davis is an Aussie living in Tanzania, writing at meetjesusatuni.com.