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ALBATROS – Meeting a different culture.

A SIMULATION GAME.

This simulation game is not our invention; it is one of those activities that are passed
among peacemakers and people who work for understanding between different
cultures. Some have criticized this activity, but we found it very useful as an eye-
opener. The objective of the game is to help participants to become aware of how
easily we evaluate or judge situations on the basis of our own cultural values and
norms, normally without realizing what we are doing.

First presented by Donald Batchelder and Elisabeth Warner (Beyond Experience: the
experimental approach to cross-cultural education, Experiment Press, 1979), it seems
to me that the version we had in our hands has been adapted over the years, so it
might not correspond exactly to the original.

We give a short description of the activity:


Participants are told that they are going to visit Albatros, a place where costumes
might be different from what they are used to, and that they will be greeted by
representatives of this culture. They enter a room where two team members, a
woman and a man, are dressed beautifully in sheets and a circle of chairs awaits them.
Men wear shoes and are asked to sit on the chairs; women are bare foot and are
invited to sit on the floor. The two Albatrossians don’t speak; they click, hiss and hum.
They are leading the greeting ceremony, in a calm, warm and friendly atmosphere.
First, the man greets each participating men, touching his shoulder with his shoulder
(or some other unusual way of greeting). Then, the woman greets each woman in the
round, caressing her feet.

In a second moment, a bowl of water is passed and men and women are invited, in a
different way, to refresh their hands. Next, food is offered to the visitors by the
Albatrossian woman: she places food in the men’s mouths and asks the women to take
their food from the plate. Everything is done serenely and with great dignity. There are
pauses in which both sit down (the man on a chair, the woman on the floor); in those
moments, the man might caress the head of the woman. At the end, the two
Albatrossians together choose the female visitor with the largest feet, greet again
every participant and then leave with her.

The most important part of the Simulation Game is the sharing and evaluating of
reactions and feelings, followed by an analysis and deeper understanding of the
situation:
Every participant is invited to share what he / she felt during the visit in Albatros. The
woman who was chosen is asked specifically about her feelings.

In a second moment, participants are asked to share what exactly they observed, what
exactly happened, what exactly each person was doing. Here it is important to
distinguish between what could be observed, the facts, and the interpretations that
participants make of those facts.
A third question might be: “what aspects of this culture have surprised you most,
impressed you most, irritated you most?

Then the facilitator of the discussion reveals that, contrary to most of the participants’
conclusions, the Albatrossian society values women above men: because to them the
Earth is sacred, all fruitfulness is blessed and women are one with the Earth. This is
why only the women are allowed to have direct contact with the ground, while the
men have to wear shoes and sit on chairs. This is also the reason why only the women
are allowed to prepare the fruits of the earth and serve them as food.

This may be followed by a unit about cultural perception, for example with the help of
the “iceberg-model” (only a small part of our cultural values is visible; however, we
easily look at a different culture, i.e., at the visible part of it, making judgments on the
basis of our own cultural values.

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