A Brief Note On Nonverbal Travels

Nonverbal Travels
In 2011, I was in the Marine Corps and I was assigned as a Firearms Instructor at Jalalabad, Afghanistan. I spend my deployment training the Afghanistan National Police how to manipulate their primary weapons to use it in the fight. We had many cultural differences from all around the world with us when I was in Afghanistan. This made our job that much more special and that much harder. So we had to adapt and overcome our challenges by learning every culture and know how they are different with every form of communication they had. The Afghanistan people are the easiest to read and understand because of their over exaggerated emotions and knowing what to expect by a lot of them. I was with the Afghanistan people and recruits for 7 months, this gave us time to learn their different cultures, languages and beliefs and understand how they interact when they are encountered in person. We had many Ally NATO counterparts that helped us in our operations. We had French, Bosnian, German, Canadian, Syrian, Canadian, African, Australian, Russian, and Jordanian. This was a challenge sometimes when we had to communicate with different teams. But what made it easier was that I was in charge with the firearm instructions and everyone had to follow what I demonstrated.

In Afghanistan you have many variant cultures. You had the Pashtu, Uzbeki, and Dari tribes. Different regions of Afghanistan you would run into different languages. But they all have the same style of communication. The Afghanistan people have a different way to communicate than we do here in America. They usually size up to whomever they are interacting with (looking up and down whomever they encounter) whereas Americans usually keep eye contact with whom they are speaking with. They do this especially with foreigners that they first meet, it is a sign of intimidation when they present this to you. When we had interactions with the Afghans, we wore reflective lens glasses so we can keep an eye out without showing who we were looking at to see which one of them would look at my side arms M9 Pistol and looking at my Body Armor. This was a red flag that they were trying to learn my weak points and see how they could take my pistol if they had a chance. Afghans usually also stare at Americans, but not at other Afghans, whereas Americans believe it is offensive to stare at someone. Afghans accept many things that Americans find offensive, such as smacking their teeth, invading personal space and asking a lot of personal questions. They have a lot of excuses and blame it on their religious belief, which the other Afghans accept the excuses because if they do not believe the excuse that was given they will offend the Muslim belief and offend Allah. So when we gave them a time we had 2 different times that was expected, the real time or Afghan time. They had no sense of urgency to regards of time. (Afghan time is usually about 2 hours late.) The excuse of “I had to pray” or “I had to get bread from the market” was a usual excuse for being late. We called them the “Afghan Excuse.”
The Afghans like to touch each other such as holding hands with interlocking fingers and having their arms hung around other men. This may seem queer to our culture but in the eyes of a Middle Eastern culture this is friendship and trust. I have had times in Afghanistan where I would hold hands with the Afghan instructors when they were giving me a tour around the facility, of course it would only be with instructors that I knew and trusted. We would do routes and see men walking around town with their brother or cousin and yes they would walk around hold hand with interlocking fingers, swinging their arms together as they walked.
A big thing that was an indicator in that culture is their facial gestures. They do a lot of over exaggeration in facial expressions and emotional gestures when they are questioned about a lie. It makes it easier to read their emotions a lot easier

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