Greetings and Happy Midweek!
“Tis the Season” for nesting here in the northeastern USA, and anywhere else around this wide world where Mother Nature is doing her Spring-thing! So, I thought we would reflect today on nests, literal and figurative, and connect some cross-cultural nesting dots. This fits nicely into the PROcess focus in our Global SKILLs PROACTive strategies, because certainly all kinds of nest-building and nesting certainly involve ‘process’.*
While living in West Africa, I became an avid birder and on one bird watching excursion in southern Benin, a group of us happened upon an overgrown field. We were initially disappointed because, it being late morning, there was little bird activity - nothing to really hone in on and identify. However, then we began to notice a treasure trove of intricately woven nests - hanging from the acacia trees, attached to the tall grasses, a few which had fallen to the ground. Although we suspected these were weaver bird nests, there are multiple species of weavers and we were out of our home area so not familiar with which specific weavers might have done this awesome work. Happily our excellent field guide included an illustration of each weaver species nest - and we soon identified about 5 species - without a bird in sight!! **
I can totally see ‘weaving’ this experience into at least one cross-cultural insight! When we are wanting to learn something or integrate better or build a relationship, but aren’t finding the specific source of cultural information we are looking for (artifact, linguistic example, behavior, person), if we look around at what is there culturally…we might just find something or someone even better and learn more than we anticipated!! Finding those nests and identifying their weaver makers through them is one of my all time favorite birding experiences…
How about you ~ what’s one recent ‘nesting’ experience you can weave into a cultural insight?!
Share about that with a friend or note it here.
And check out the Global SKILLs LINKs below for other nesting moments.
Thanks for being part of this Connect community.
Until next week,
Betsy
* PROACTive Learning Strategies: PRO = PROfile, PROcess (which we looked at today), PROgram
ACT = Application, Collaboration and Transformation (which we looked at today)
~ contact me for more information on these strategies and how you might use them in your current programming
** Barlow, Clive et al. 1997. The Field Guide to Birds of The Gambia and Senegal. (p 355-362).
Global SKILLs LINKs
~ take a walk through this link and pretend you are in the field identifying weaver nests…and your advantage over my experience is many of these images do have the birds as well: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/weaver-bird-nest.html
~ nesting and loss in a cross cultural relationship: https://www.expatnest.com/expat-story-the-gifts-of-a-cross-cultural-relationship/
~ very cool cultural nests insights from Australian Aboriginal communities: https://www.aecg.nsw.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NSW-AECG-Language-and-Culture-Nests-QA-doc_website.pdf
2022 ~ Celebrating 40+ years of working in
intercultural communications and global community building
“It takes a community to build a community”
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