I’ve often been asked if I could provide information about certain cultures and the behaviours that they find offensive and the types of food that they eat.  I’ve also been asked to provide some recipes from different cultures (while I quite enjoy cooking, I’m certainly not an expert in the culinary delights of the millions of cultural groups around the world).  More often than not, I explain that I would rather not talk about cultural specifics.  Rather, I prefer to offer strategies to help people learn about the individuals with whom they are in contact.  If you know how to ask the right questions, you are most of the way there. 

However, as I discussed in the previous post, food and tastes are very important to our sense of wellbeing.  So, how do we cater to the gastronomic needs of our homestay students?

One way of doing this is to allow them to cook for the family from time to time.  This can be a very enjoyable experience as you can learn a considerable amount about your student, their family, and their personal tastes.  If they let you help with the cooking, you can also learn some fantastic recipes! 

On the other hand, I’ve spoken to a number of homestay hosts who would prefer that their students did not use the kitchen.  I can understand this sentiment entirely (just see my post on pots and pans!).  Also, some students do not know how to cook and have never used hotplates (I get nervous particularly when they first start using the gas burners).  So, in cases such as this, how can you cater specifically to their food needs?

One of the first things that I do when a new student comes to stay with us is to ask the student to ask their mum to send the recipe for their favourite meal(s).   I’ve received a few recipe books from wherever-home-is and occasionally a written list of ingredients and a few tips on how to cook them.  I love getting recipes from the students’ mothers.  The taste is authentic, unlike many recipe books here that “Australianise” the ingredients and flavours. 

One time, I received some recipe books in the mail and, together with my Korean girl, we found her favourite dish - barbequed pork ribs.  So I let her know when I planned to cook them.  I spent the next couple of days chasing up the ingredients, while she chatted with her sister and mother (apparently they were joking about how badly I would cook:c). 

Anyway, I cooked up the ribs, and watched as my young friend took her first bite.  Her eyes grew moist and a smile stretched slowly across her face.  It took her a couple of minutes before she looked back at me and said, “It tastes just like mum’s!”  Although I couldn’t cook Korean food all of the time, it meant that I could provide a little taste of home when it was needed.

Although these are some of the strategies that I use, I’m also well aware that there are many different ways that homestay hosts cater to the food needs of their guests.  If you have any ideas that you would like to share, I would really like to hear them. 

Cheers

Katie

So, instead of cooking dinner, I started cutting the bread, buttering it and whipping together the custard.  I wacked it into the oven and waited anxiously for it to acquire that lovely golden brown crust.  It tasted just as I remembered and I melted… As I ate it, a warm sense of wellbeing flushed over me (let’s forget about that nagging little guilt that was hissing, “CALORIES!!” at the back of my mind!).  Actually, I ended up eating the left-overs for breakfast and lunch for the next two days. 

We humans have a very strong connection with food.  There are a number of reasons for this: 

1.  Human Biology: Our sense of smell is very closely linked with memory and emotion.  In fact, the part of our brain that interprets smell (the olfactory bulb) is very close to the part of the brain that holds memory and emotion.  So this is why whenever I smell Imperial Leather soap, I remember my grandmother, who passed away when I was 15.  Also, when we eat, our sense of smell is working very hard.  Our taste buds on our tongues detect sweet, sour, bitter etc. but our noses detect the ‘taste’ of the food.  This is why it’s difficult to taste food when we have a blocked nose.  

2. Culture: We often associate certain foods with aspects of our culture.  We eat certain foods during festivals (like hot crossed buns, chocolate and boiled eggs at Easter - Yum!).  Our mums or grandmothers have their special foods to tempt sick stomachs (like chicken soup) or to comfort a broken heart.

3. Socialisation:  Sharing food is one of the main ways in which we humans relate to each other, develop relationships and maintain friendships.  You might go the the pub with your mates, or invite your best friend and their family over for dinner, or grab a cup of coffee with a colleague.  The types of food that you eat can indicate wealth or social status, links with other cultures or attitudes towards lifestyle.

Food is a HUGE part of our lives, our histories and our identities.  Is it any wonder, then, that some of our homestay students can have difficulty getting used to the food that we serve?  I’ll expand on this in the next blog post. 

But, for now, I’d encourage you to step back and think about the types of food that stir your emotions and memories.  Think of the types of food that you eat regularly.  What are the many influences on your own food preferences?  What foods would you miss the most if you moved to a different country?

Well, that’s a fair bit of thinking, so I’d better leave you to it!

Cheers

Katie

So, in order for us to understand the terms more fully, let’s go back to where it all began…with Geert Hofstede - one of the fathers of cross-cultural studies….(NO! Don’t let those eyes glaze over yet!)…

It all began in 1967 when Hofstede gathered data from (literally) thousands of IBM employees from around the globe about their cultural beliefs.  It took him around 6 years, but he came up with some ground breaking findings (well, for the time, anyway).   From the information that he had collected, Hofstede found 5 cultural ‘dimensions’, one of which he called “individualism vs. collectivism” (we won’t look at the other 4 this time - maybe at a later date).  Hofstede was then able to place each country onto a graph that showed how collectivistic or individualistic they are.  It’s pretty cool stuff.  In fact, other people have continued his research into the new milenium with new studies that still confirm his findings.  

Hofstede describes the  ”individualism vs. collectivism”  dimension as:

“…the degree to which individuals are inte-grated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.”  If you want to read more, click here 

So, this is where the idea first sprang.  Although it’s very cool, there is a bit of a hitch…  

For starters, it is a quantitative study.  For those of you who are not research bofins, a quantitative study uses HEAPS of information from multiple sources so that we can then draw generalisations.  So I guess you could say that it’s more like an overview rather than the details.  So this is where the collectivist/individualist stereotypes come from.  However, we must remember that there are huge variations within any given culture.  Obviously, we, as homestay hosts, live with students from other cultures and, I think that there is a danger for us to assume that most of them are collectivists. 

So, let’s look at the issue from a different angle.  Let’s assume that Australians are pretty individualistic. If you look at my photo (I’m 6th generation Australian and blonde), you might expect me to come from a small nuclear family (with 2 kids), where we get together every now and then, but we all do our own thing…

This is where it’s important to notice the detail:

You see, my mum is one of 9 children and I’m one of 5 children and we all spend quite a bit of time together.  I helped my Aunts when they had babies.  My aunts and sisters helped me when Tristan came along.  My youngest aunt is having babies now too, so my cousins play with my son (see if you can get your head around that:c).  My grandfather still lives on the farm and two of his boys live there (three houses all in a row with just one padock separating them all). 

When all is said a done, one of my friends from Thailand summed it up saying, “Katie, you are more collectivist than most Thai people!”

Anyway, I won’t bore you with any more family details!  But I hope you get the picture.  What I take away from the individualist/collectivist theory is that it can give us an idea of some of the ideologies that our homestay students might have.  However, we must remember that we should never make assumptions - because they just might be wrong.

Soon after we bought the pans we decided to become homestay hosts.  It didn’t take long before I walked into the kitchen where my lovely pans were smoking like chimneys. The sizzle  and spit of hot food accompanied the most delicious smells of Chinese cooking.  Needless to say, my lifetime-guaranteed pots are now about as non-stick as a jar of honey. 

I haven’t bought more expensive pots or pans.  I can’t afford to keep replacing them!  In fact we still use one of the pans (although our pancakes and omelettes turn out more like scrambled eggs these days:c)

On a more serious note, as a homestay host it’s worth thinking about the everyday equipment that you use around the house.  Different people use household equipment in different ways (some ways more expertly than others!) .  If I could go back and do things a little differently, I would have purchased some less expensive cooking utensils which were designed for cooking with smoking hot oil.  This way, I could have kept my non-stick pans for special occasions. 

Happy Cooking!!

My research was looking at the non-academic welfare of adolescent international students.  Not surprisingly, student accommodation featured quite heavily.  Because many of the student participants were under 18, they had to be placed in appropriate, supervised care.  So, most of them were living in homestay, a number were in boarding, and a few were living with parents or relatives.  In the questionnaire, the students were asked a number of questions about: their culture shock experiences; their ability to integrate with the local students; and how comfortable they were when they were faced with aspects of the Australian culture.  Among other things, they were also asked if they would recommend their form of accommodation to their friends.

I must admit, I was blown away by the results:

• Although homestay students tended to experience relatively high levels of ongoing symptoms of culture shock 77% of the homestay students said that they would recommend it to their friends.  
• The boarders were fairly evenly split between those who would advocate boarding (51%) and those who would not (49%).

For those of you who like a visual representation, here is a graph that might give you a better picture:

So there is something about homestay that the students appreciate. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but here are some of my guesses.

• It is possible that the constant contact with their homestay hosts enables the students to develop more confidence in their English language abilities and helps them to feel as if they fit in. 
• It may also indicate that the students feel a sense of security living in a family-type situation where their individual needs can be met.

If you can think of more reasons, I’d be really happy to hear from you, and perhaps I could test out some hypotheses in future research (feel free to leave a comment under this post, or send me an email at: k.richardson@ieca.com.au).

No matter the reasons for the very positive response toward homestay, it’s encouraging to hear that, despite the ups and downs of hosting, the statistics show that you areappreciated and that homestay hosts can become an incredibly important part of a young international student’s world.

Aside from the educational side of things, one of the most intriguing aspects of the week was the relationships that were forged.  At the beginning of the week, we were all strangers.  We shyly sidled up to each other, politely swapping names and faculty affiliations.   Everything was extremely ‘civilized’ - for the first couple of hours, anyway.  It didn’t take long before we were hotly debating ethical conundrums, sharing our life experiences, and tuning out over evening drinks. 

Getting to know people can take a long time, but (so I learned last week) it takes people approximately 8 hours of continuous contact to begin to develop trust.  By the end of the week we were a tight-knit group, swapping emails and catching up for coffee.

In a similar vein, I find that I can struggle with those first few awkward days when a homestay student first arrives in my home.  The student isn’t quite sure of what they can and can’t do.  I’m not quite sure how much they know about Australian bathrooms, public transport, cooking…I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences!  We all tend to feel out-of-place as we get to know each other.  In my experience it takes about 4 weeks to settle into the new groove properly. 

I like to invite my students to sit and chat in the evenings.   Sometimes we would chat about deep and meaningful things, and other times we would just watch the TV, or gossip, or tease each other.  It doesn’t matter what the topic of conversation is, the point is that you are building relationships.  As a homestay, this is especially important.  The more you interact, the more trust can be built, and the more comfortable your homestay family will be.

Tristan has so many Aunties now that he gets a little confused with names.  Although, this doesn’t seem to lessen the bond that he makes with each one.  I love to see the unconditional affection that he lavishes on them, as he leans toward them saying, “You’re GOOOOORGEOUS!!”  Tristan sees no skin colour.  He hears no accent.  He doesn’t care about differences in behaviour.  He just loves the person. 

I think that there is so much that we can learn from kids.  How often do we spend time looking past the external differences and see the person.  How often do we realise our similarities: the fact that we all love, we all laugh, we all hurt, we all have families, we all have needs, and we all love a good gossip!  We might do things slightly differently and there may be miscommunication from time to time, but if we can see past this, there is so much potential to build lasting bonds. 

Last week, Auntie Emmi moved out again, and Tristan has been asking, “Where’s Auntie Joy?”  He spent a day or two hoping that “Auntie Joy” (aka Auntie Emmi) would walk through the door.  This is the hard part about building bonds - there are always goodbyes.  However, I hope that my little boy will learn that, as people come in and go out of our lives, we are enriched.  We leave our imprint on them, and they leave part of themselves with us.  In my world, this is how we have created our Homestay Family, with sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles from all corners of the world.

Anyway, for the first time in a couple of years we have had a post-grad student living here, too.  It’s been somewhat disrupting to our normal routine, but I’ve really enjoyed having another female in the house.  My little son loves it too - yet another ‘aunty’ to spoil him! However, there has been one little hitch - we don’t know how long is she planning to stay here… At first it seemed that it would be just three weeks.  This suited our time table, since I’ve got quite a few commitments coming up.  But, thesis writing can be a tricky thing and, from experience, I am very aware that it will always take longer than one first predicts.  So, our three week homestay hosting venture changed to five weeks, then to four, and now back to three weeks (I think).  We still have to discuss the final plans.  In fact, in my experience, unexpected arrivals and departures are part and parcel of being a homestay host.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I LOVE being a homestay host - but it can be really unpredictable at times!  And it’s during these unpredictable times that our routines go out the window, the house gets a bit messy, husbands/partners find that it’s a good time to catch the flu, and little boys decide they don’t believe in bed time.  It can be very unsettling.  So, here are a few tips that you might find helpful:

• Expect the unexpected.  Don’t be offended if a student decides to move on.  It’s usually not about you.
• Develop good communication channels between yourself and your students.  Encourage them to communicate their thoughts.  Discuss your plans with the student well in advance.
• Keep a calendar where everyone in the household can see it and encourage them to write on it.
• Don’t get too upset if your routine is dirupted - you can always resume it when things settle down. 
• Do your best to keep up with the housework, but if it gets a bit out-of-control (like mine is at the moment!) don’t stress, the housework will wait for you:c)
• Allow your plans to have flexibility - predict the unpredictable, so you can deal with the unknown when, or if, it arises.  Be prepared to negotiate important dates.

And may you enjoy the many little surprises!

Cheers

Katie

For many, no amount of planning could have changed the outcome of this disaster.  However, there is a lot that we can do in order to plan for fire emergencies in our own home.  In boarding houses, they are legally bound to have evacuation plans, fire blankets and extinguishes, and professional checks for electric items.  However, there are no such requirements for homestays.  So, here are a few things you can do in order to protect yourself, your family and homestay guests:

1.  Have an emergency evacuation plan and make sure that everyone in the household knows about it.  It’s a good idea to also draw up diagrams for the back of each door (like you might find in a hotel). 

2. Keep fire blankets and extinguishers in the kitchen.  Make sure that everyone knows where they are kept and that you know how to use them. Once they have been used, make sure you either buy a new blanket/extinguisher or have it serviced by trained professionals

3. Make sure that all of your electrical equipment is safe.  If you are worried about blow heaters in bedrooms, you might like to think about other options for heating.  Also, make sure that you know what electrical equipment your homestay students have brought with them.

4.  It’s important that homestay students are made aware of dangers with cooking.  You might even like to get them to cook with you from time to time and talk about how to put out an oil fire (i.e. NEVER use water.  Use a lid, salt, flour or a fire blanket to stifle the fire) and other safety considerations.

5. Make sure that your homestay students don’t smoke in their bedrooms.

6. Ensure that there are smoke alarms in the house and that their batteries are full.  Check them regularly.

So, with a bit of care, we can minimise the risks of fire within the home.  On this note, be prepared and stay safe.

Katie

But, if you think about it, culture is one of those pervasive yet illusive elements that makes life so interesting.  Basically, culture exists where ever humans exist.  It is the way we do things, what we believe about ourselves and how we understand the world around us.  So let’s unravel it a bit and take a look at some layers…like an onion - or parfait, whichever you prefer.

If we look at culture from a grand scale, we see national/ethnical stereotypes, such as the use of chopsticks as opposed to forks; living conditions in the developing world versus those we enjoy in the first world.  However, it can be pretty dangerous making assumptions about our homestay students based off these broad stereotypes.  In reality, we need to understand the many elements that combine to create this evasive thing we know as culture. 

• Culture can be determined by physical factors, such as geographical space.  For example, different weather and soil conditions can determine the types of foods that people can access or produce, or altitude can determine the types of sports or activities that a community will promote (which would explain why ice hockey isn’t so popular here in Melbourne).
• Culture is influenced by the history of a community.  We can see areas of the world that have experienced conflicts that go back for generations.  History can determine the languages that we speak, or languages that have faded away, forced to die or neglected into oblivion.
• Culture is determined by economics and the distribution of wealth.
• Culture is influenced by religion.
• Culture is reflected in art, music, the media, the foods we eat, the ways we show politeness, our attitudes towards children and younger generations…

I think you are starting to get the idea!  It pervades every corner of our lives, so much so that we usually don’t even notice our own cultural quirks, and we expect that the way we live is normal.   

Families also develop their own cultures.  As a kid, I remember staying at a friend’s house who lived just around the corner from me.  I was horrified and fascinated at the same time, watching the partially cooked egg as it slid off the spatular and wobbled onto my plate.  I was only away from home for a night, but boy did I miss my mum’s cooking!!

Homestay is a really unique situation in terms of culture.  If we go to another country, we are exposed to the external cultural trends of an area. But, if we live with a local - in their home and become a part of their family, you get to see the rich and unique tapestry that forms the ways in which people think, work, interact…

If I think about my own little family, not only has our way of doing things impacted the lives of our homestay guests, but their cultures and lives have left their marks on the way we live…

So, I guess this is a challenge to some degree…What is your family culture?  What has influenced the ways in which you think, behave, live?   It’s an interesting think to do, really… 

Cheers

Katie