Since
Dr. Robert L. Humphrey's book - VALUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
- edited by his personal student - Jack Hoban, was very
hard to find, I had decided to dedicate some pages for
allowing you to read about some of his stories and cases.
His incredible work and research that he had accomplished
throughout his life will amaze you. His global cross-cultural
detective work to stop cross-cultural conflicts and violence
resolution are important lessons to be remembered. These
are taken from the book itself.
Please
click on image to visit Dr. Humphrey's OFFICIAL website
by Jack Hoban.
DR.
ROBERT L. HUMPHREY'S
www.LifeValues.com
He
is sorely missed.
Regarding
the issue above of smelly human waste on their crops, I encountered
it also in the harsh land of our great Asian allies, the Koreans.
This was a dozen years ago before their miracle of major economic
development. But I doubt if even those hardworking people could
dispense so rapidly with the use of humankind's most reliable
fertilizer.
There was another annoying smell issue in Korea for Americans.
(The Koreans are one of the few people on earth, whom I know,
who are so tough that I would risk writing openly about them
and not fear false offense. I hope the recent economic development
has not filled them with false pride and modernized softness.)
The food staple in Korea was fermented raw cabbage, called kimchi.
It smells every bit as powerful on your breath as our garlic,
except in Korea, unlike us with the garlic, everyone ate the
kimchi; everybody. When I came home in the evening
while I was working in Seoul and picked-up my one-year-old baby
son after our Korean maid had made him into a kimchi-lover,
I could hardly stand to hold him. His normally sweet little
baby breath was worse than King Kong's to me.
Our military men were attended by female Korean barbers. The
barbers could not eat their kimchi before work or else they
had to wear cloth masks over their mouths to find compatibility
with their American clientele. It was a problem if only an amusing
one. Nonetheless, we had two strong anti-Korean smell-issues
to deal with: the kimchi and the fertilizer.
Against that background, I was visited one day by a young member
of the U.S. Peace Corps. He wanted me to try to find out why
his Korean house-hosts did not want him to stay in their home
any longer.
My chief interpreter in Korea was a relatively uneducated but
brilliant young man by the name of Mr. Hong. His forte was personality.
He could get the self-implicating truth out of a pathological
liar.
I presented him with our problem and asked him to try to arrange
a meeting with the head of the household involved in the Peace
Corps case.
"All right," Mr. Hong agreed, "but first, he
said, I would like to show you something that might lead you
more quickly to your answer."
Mr. Hong took me to an orphanage near a U.S. military base.
We arrived at a prearranged hour and the orphanage director
sent us, immediately, over to a couple of elderly Koreans who
were working with a large pile of donated U.S. Army clothing.
"Figure out what they are doing," Mr. Hong said, laughing
to himself.
I watched; it was strange. They were taking each article of
clothing, holding it up to their faces for a second and then
folding most pieces and laying them neatly in a pile, or else,
for a few pieces, throwing them into a trash can. The strange
thing was that some of the few pieces they were discarding looked
better, much better, than some of the worn or torn items that
they were keeping. Mr. Hong was by this time very much into
the culture-detective game with me, and I knew that I was not
going to get any more clues until I figured this one out or
admitted failure.
I approached the two busy workers and studied their actions.
They laughed, as Koreans do easily when amused. (And as they
do also when disappointed or even devastated. In that historically
unfortunate land, long savaged by foreigners and the capricious
Manchurian winds, they smile over tragedy, as Mr. Hong once
told me, to keep from crying. Another elderly Korean once told
me, "Ours may be the only land where we tried all the religions,
and they all failed us." Korea's history is indeed grim.
Mr. Hong's four-year old son studied by candlelight in their
small hovel until late every night. The Koreans are tough. If
you watched the 1988 Olympics, you know that what they hate
most is losing a fight.)
It was clear: The two elders were smelling the articles of clothing.
Yes, they were giving them some kind of a smell test. At once
I speculated that the clothes were for the orphans but the children
did not like all of the after-shave lotion smell and all the
other cosmetic odors that our Americans used. But then, on second
thought, why throw them away? Those were expensive, valuable,
woolen articles for warmth in a freezing land. The Koreans,
of all people, would never be so soft or wasteful. Cosmetic
smells could be totally cleaned out. It had to be something
else.
I picked up a folded shirt and smelled it. Nice. In fact it
smelled of some familiar after-shave. I turned to the trash
can; took a shirt out and smelled it. WOW! Terrible! I blew
out through my nostrils and pulled back a little trying not
to be noticed. They did notice, and laughed. Everyone in the
compound laughed. (Our visit had been prepared for and it had
attracted a crowd.)
I looked at Mr. Hong and asked? "Are you saying that some
of our cloths smell too strong for Koreans to use?"
Mr. Hong just laughed, which was his way of saying, "You
got it, Humphrey."
"Okay, let me expand the question: Are you saying that
some of our American clothes smell too strong for Korean orphans
to use but some Korean clothes don't?"
He laughed again and said: "Bow a bit to everyone and thank
the director. They just let you in on this secret after I persuaded
them you could be trusted. Let's go."
In the car, I asked Mr. Hong how he explained it all. He didn't.
He just said that it was an old long-standing problem and added
that it was so bad that many Koreans did not like to serve with
American outfits in Vietnam because the smell of a U.S. unit
could be so strong that the enemy Viet Cong, the Koreans feared,
could smell a unit of Americans hiding in the bush.
Despite having witnessed and personally experienced the validity
of the orphanage smell-test exercise, it was still
similar to the restaurant owner, near Sardinia, trying to tell
me that they considered Americans stingy. The part that I could
not fathom was not the idea that we Americans smell; obviously
everyone does. It was the assertion that the kimchi-eating Koreans
did not smell worse; that was the absurdity. I pressed Mr. Hong
on that point.
"Korean breath, yes," he allowed, "but with Americans,
somehow, it is in the whole body, even when the breath is fresh
and after a bath. There is whispering about the Peace Corps
people. They have a definite problem because the talk is strong."
"What exactly is said?" I asked.
"Well," said Mr. Hong, "The tactful Koreans whisper
that the Americans cannot live in our tiny little houses with
us because the Americans smell like rancid butter."
I hesitated to ask the next obvious question, but did: "What
do the Koreans who are not tactful say?"
Looking
straight ahead as he drove, Mr. Hong said as softly as he could:
"The zoo."
I left it there for a couple of days. What would you have done?
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Was Mr. Hong playing a practical joke on me? It was possible.
I spent a couple of days in the American military library; Mr.
Hong in a Korean library researching the American smell issue.
Nothing.
We started searching out the other Americans who lived in traditional
Korean homes, especially other Peace Corps members. These few
were serious, subdued, impressive young persons who did not
seem to be aware of the smell problem. But neither were they
very happy or filled with a feeling of success; so I suspected
they had the problem and also did not understand it.
Within a week we ran into a young American Peace Corpsman who
was one of the more outgoing and attractive persons I have ever
met. He was dressed in a white cotton suit of some kind rather
than the popular darker clothes that prevailed in Korea. He
was so confident that I broached the smell issue at once. Laughing,
I asked him, right after introducing myself: "Did you ever
have any kind of a body odor problem here in Korea?"
Jackpot!
"Sure," he said, matter-of-factly, "it is from
our heavy meat diet. My adopted Korean grandfather told me that
the meat makes me smell like a meat-eating animal. So I took-up
a rice diet. It required about six weeks to get rid of my strong
smell. I had to throw away my suit. That, in fact, is why I
have this nice fresh new one; I couldn't get the body odor out
of the other one."
I was almost convinced but still offered one last halfhearted
rebuttal. "The Koreans that I know, eat meat. Is your adopted
Korean family a Buddhist family?"
"No," he answered, "like all the other Koreans,
they grind-up and eat what little bit of meat they can afford
in their rice. But they can't afford much."
"What happens," I asked, "when your other Peace
Corps friends visit you at your Korean house? Can you, personally,
smell them now that you no longer have a strong odor?"
"It's no problem;" he said, "after they leave,
we just air out the house. What is amusing, "he laughed,"
is to visit a Korean diplomat's house after they have had a
party with many Americans present. It may be midwinter, freezing
cold, and there it is: All the doors and windows open, airing
out the house, and making excuses to me-not wanting to tell
me why. It is a secret little problem all right."
I was ready. The account was now very honorable, with a strong
probability of being absolutely sound. It would probably be
acceptable to the GIs. If so, it was a honey of a balancer at
least for the human waste smell issue. I tried it soon on a
group of GIs. There were no rebuttals. Maybe it was because
I was lucky again. When you first present this account to unsuspecting
Americans, it contains enough embarrassment that, for a moment
or so, it shocks a crowd into silence. In that first group I
talked to, there was a lad present who identified himself as
a farm boy and was the first to speak.
"It makes sense," he said. "If you put your face
against the neck of a horse or cow, their smell is pleasant,
sort' a like the feed they eat; or cows, like fresh milk. Of
course they eat no meat at all. But meat-eating animals like
dogs and cats; man! they can smell strong as hell. Somebody
once said it right: you are what you eat."
In my subsequent speeches on this topic, I always included
that GI farmer boy's comments. Believe me, that human waste
smell issue was one difficult barrier against promoting respect
for Koreans among Americans. But we found that along with
the true account of the starving children and the meat-eater's
body odor, we could knock it cold.
Above
from pages 226 - 231
Dr.
Robert L. Humphrey's
VALUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
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on image to BUY BOOK
