Compared to American culture, Swahili culture seemed to place more emphasis on the idea of the central family unit and the idea of the superiority of elders. This identity of the family as a social unit provides great contrast to the American identity of the individual as the social unit. During our interactions with our family, it was apparent that when family was brought into the equation, the children were fast in fulfilling the duties presented to them. For example, whenever their mother called them, they were fast to put aside everything to assist her. It was also fairly apparent that the refugees demonstrated incredibly high morals. It was never permitted for them to lie, curse, or hurt someone else, and they were always very polite, practicing good manners when interacting with others.
The service project helped us to feel more comfortable with cultural differences, and it caused us to realize there are commonalities in two cultures we originally thought were completely different. An example of becoming comfortable with our cultural differences is when we ate their traditional Congolese culture. At first our group was nervous about eating their food which included the entire body of small fish, cassava mash and spicy cabbage. It was
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As a result of our time that we spent with the refugees, they have become more sociable and open. They are now willing to talk, have begun to explore various new aspects of American culture and have become more comfortable with American culture. They like to watch American movies and have shown interest in websites where they can watch videos, such as youtube. The children now show increased motivation in school work as well, in that they appear to feel more comfortable asking for help in