Author’s note: This article is a tribute to the millions of OFWs across the planet who epitomize the meaning of cultural adaptation.

On the road winding through Europe, I hitchhiked to visit Olga in Växjö, Sweden, a friend I met in Amsterdam earlier.

I met her mother, who was worried about Olga’s sister — still a virgin at the age of 18. She feared that men were not attracted to her and she might end up an old maid. I was shocked. I told her that in Filipino society, mothers did not push their daughters to be devirginized before marriage.

I grew up in conservative Spanish Catholicism, where sex was sacred and allowed only after marriage, whereas casual sex was a trend in Europe.

I met a Danish girl on a beach in Denmark. Suddenly, she invited me to go swimming. The beach was empty. We were alone. She took off all her clothes casually and headed for the water. My eyes popped out. I followed, but I was too shy to go in nude.

In Freiburg, Germany, while hitchhiking, a German student picked me up, and when I told him I did not know where to go, he laughed and invited me to his university campus dorm. He said I could sleep in the bed of his girlfriend’s roommate, who went home for the weekend. I was shocked to discover that in German university dorms, men and women shared rooms without anything happening.

In the morning, I took a shower. The door had no lock, the shower tub had no curtain. A girl barged in, and I instinctively covered my thing. She did not even look. She said hello and left after brushing her teeth. They casually undress in their rooms.

In Rotterdam, I met a Filipino nurse who complained in tears that her marriage to a Dutch guy was headed for the rocks. I advised her to immerse the guy in Filipino culture. Let him visit her home alone in the Philippines and stay with her family for a month.

It worked. It opened his eyes. He returned to Rotterdam a changed man. Suddenly, he understood how a Filipino wife ticked — the magic of cultural adaptation.

He became kind and gentle and less arrogant and lost his superiority complex. Thus far, the wife had done all the adjusting culturally because they were in Holland. Now, he learned to adapt to Filipino culture. See what cultural immersion can do.

Filipino nurses I met told me that their Dutch guys were naïve. They would attempt to feel their behind while swimming at the beach to seduce them. Filipino sailors were better. They would spoil their dates and drown them in gifts, then get them pregnant instantly. The sailors were sick and tired of staying in the boiler rooms of ships, not seeing the sky for months. They would rather get a nurse pregnant and “jump ship” and stay with their girlfriends. The lonely nurses were more than willing to get pregnant.

OFWs are the most adaptable to foreign cultures, which is why they are in demand everywhere. Dutch patients ask why they feel no pain when a Filipino nurse bandages their wounds, which is different from a Dutch nurse. They attribute it to lief, the gentle darling nature of Filipino nurses.

The Japanese are also very adaptable to foreign cultures. When hordes of farmers migrated to Mindanao to escape the vicious Meiji, Japan’s Hitler, in the late 19th century, they were hunted down after World War II by locals who equated them with the vicious Japanese soldiers. They escaped into the Bagobo communities of Mt. Apo and blended and integrated with them.

A Japanese journalist friend told me he could not identify them at first. They spoke perfect Bagobo and looked like them.

It is not surprising then to realize why call centers abound in the Philippines. We speak perfect English and can even mimic Chinese and Indian accents. And we have millions of OFWs scattered throughout the planet who are in demand and who are the largest dollar earners for the nation.

Cultural adaptation is a key ingredient for surviving in a foreign land. You have to be sensitive. You have to absorb, listen, and adapt, or else you cannot survive.

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