02/14/2019 - Personal Space Differences

While I was watching the videos and the readings, I just remember a funny part of the  80´s movie: "Gods must be crazy", where the main character "Xixo" hunted an animal at a protected area and he was sent to jail by this behaviour, by this example He was abruptly invading a private space set by others. 

This is "Xixo", if you don´t know or remember the movie we are talking about.

Another example that appears in my mind are houses in the U.S. in a neighboorhood, they are separated one from another, they really care about their personal spaces but in my country, Perú, our houses are closer one from the other. I bet this happens because we are living in a crowded city where we need to save living spaces. Ans just yesterday a friend of the family from another country told us that we as Peruvians are the most friendly people He has ever known, and that is why we build interpersonal relationships easily, So He made me think about that.

As we can see in the picture, every family has its personal bubble space, they keep their autonomy among their neighboorhoods.

This is a typical neighboorhood in Lima, we can notice  the difference about space between houses, each house is close to one another, maybe because we are very friendly people or for lack of space on streets, 

Now, related to body language, what is fine in some cultures; can be disrespectful in some other ones. I have a personal experience about this. I am a very friendly person and whenever I greet somenone I always like to give hugs, once I was at church greeting everyone and an older sister told me: "sister Yanira your hugs are like energy for me, they comfort me so much, they are like a battery charger for me".  But there was this moment when elders introduced me a couple that has three children, elders introduced me to them and to the children as I was the primary president. So I offered them a warm hug but this kid didn´t want me to stay close to him and his mom told me that He has asperger syndrom and that typicall social or love demonstrations are difficult to face for them, until that day I didn´t know a clue about this syndrom I didn´t know how to treat this kid so his mom joined us to primary classroom, He did all manual activities we prepared for kids but he wasn`t socializing to any other kid, but He did understand everything that the sister explained during the class, it was unbeliavable. Now I know a few about that syndrom. So by having this subject about personal space differences, we as teachers must be aware this topic. So, how do you  think a teacher should manage these situations in class? what can we do if we realize that one of our students needs a dramatic personal space?, think about that situation when working on pairs or groups. It seems like a challengue, doesn´t it?.

I found this funny cartoon online about personal space, It`s a good way to learn about it through a smile.