Friends in far places

Intercultural relationships are a crucial part of my international photojournalism projects. One of the first steps when we arrive within a country is choosing who will be our translators. We contact journalists, NGOs, students, and anyone else who is willing to help prior to arriving in the country. Then on our first night we host a big dinner for everyone who has helped us and who will help us make our stories come to life. We call these people our fixers. Essentially they translate for us, protect us, and help us develop relationships with the people in our stories. In order to be successful in building a story in short amounts of time, we have to make these people care about us and about our projects. It comes down to the challenge of creating and sustaining intercultural relationships.

            

For example, while I was in India last summer we worked with the World Media Academy. Their students were designated by their professors to help us with our projects for a week. After the week was up we were left with a challenge. Some students were willing to continue helping while others decided they did not have the time.

I was fortunate enough to be paired up with a fellow photographer, Rishabh Kumar. He was 23 and was in his final weeks of school. We instantly hit it off. We made him care about our story and we established a personal relationship with him making him care about our success and experience in India.

Above: Sarah, my classmate, and Rishabh, our translator draw on the wall of an overpass as we wait to photograph trains passing underneath, early in the morning in New Delhi, India. 

After our first day of photographing the migrant train workers at the Hazarat Nizamuddin railway station he came back to our guesthouse to help us make a few calls and to have lunch with us. We examined each other’s photographs and realized we both had things that we could learn from one another, which Martin and Nakayama (2012) interpret as relational learning, "Learning that comes form a particular relationship but generalizes to other contexts," (p. 392) and in this context we would be learning more about photojournalism. Then we proceeded to spend the next hour or so sharing music and talking about Adele as he sang "Rolling in the Deep" to me. He took us to lunch at a restaurant down the street from where we were staying and ordered us a feast, insisting that we try everything as he shared is culture with us. Within a day of knowing him we had gotten to the point of joking around and calling each other friends and because of that he was dedicated to helping us throughout the trip.

At the end of our time we said a sad goodbye and promised to keep in contact. In the first several months of being home we chatted through Facebook almost every day and Skyped once a week. While not as frequently, we still talk to this day and anticipate the day when we will see each other again.

           
Intercultural relationships are invaluable as they teach you more about the world and its people than anything else possibly could. My relationship with Rishabh would best be described through Baxter's differences-similartities dialectic model. Both as photographers we were slightly attracted to each other through the similarity principle, which states, "We tend to be attracted to people who we perceive to be similar to ourselves," (Martin and Nakayama, 2012, p. 398). The main difference between us was our religious beliefs. I am a Christian while he is an atheist, which would be too difficult to build any serious relationship off of in my opinion. However, we are still good friends and if we every lived in the same place again I could see us spending a good deal of time together. 

Works cited

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.