The grace of good training

The picture really has nothing to do with the subject of my post. I just know that everybody likes pictures. This is me with my afternoon kindergarten students from last year.
Recently, I attended a going away supper for a fellow community member with her co-workers at a girl's home. I spent most of the evening listening to these other volunteers and their comments and reflections about life in Bolivia. Nothing they said was particularly negative or wrong. They just embodied for me the typical foreigner coming to Bolivia to volunteer. Their words got me thinking about how different they are from my own and why.
Of the group the most experience went to a woman who has been here for five months and the least experienced was a woman who had been here only about a week. That was the most significant difference between us. I remember what Bolivia looked like after a week or even five months. Even at two years, I know there is so much that I still don't understand about the culture. I am not judging them for their thoughts but to understand why mine are different I settled on a rarely acknowledged aspect of our outlooks and that is training. At the time of our three month orientation in DC, I didn't really understand everything that they were presenting to us. Now I think back to those lectures and workshops and really relate to what they were telling us about approach to mission and culture shock. The overall message that I took from my training and tried to integrate into my time in Bolivia is not a focus on what I can offer Bolivians, rather a focus on what they can offer me. As a fly on the wall of these volunteers' work spaces, I think I would see an approach of "how can I fix this clearly broken system?" I would hope that if someone saw me in my element they would see an approach of "what can these people suffering a broken system teach me?" That key difference has been the men and women in the FMS office who did all of this before us and care enough to share their wisdom and insight with us.