Cross-Cultural Greetings

The orphanage held a church service one Sunday, a service very different to the ones I have experienced back home in Massachusetts. One particular aspect that was so different was the welcome and greeting part of the service which lasted almost fifteen minutes. It involved nearly the entire congregation getting up from their seats, greeting one another, and engaging in conversation, whether they knew them or not, and whether they were right next to them or across the room. Strangers, both men and women, approached me with a smile and began to talking with me while children who had never seen me before that day ran up to me to give me a hug. It was not like back home, where many church greetings consist of shaking two, maybe three hands, saying "Good morning", and then sitting back down. I wondered how something as simple as greeting one another in church could be so different in two separate cultures. I realized that these different greetings actually reflected underlying ideologies in each culture. In some northeastern churches in the U.S. that I have experienced, it is the ideology to be conservative with greetings among strangers to be polite, but brief and usually non-interactive. This seems to stem from the norm that it is strange to be overly-extroverted with an unfamiliar person, as it can be seen as intrusive and uncomfortable to linger past the polite handshake and initial greeting. Not so in this Guatemalan church, as there is no such ideological inhibition, but rather a genuine openness and acceptance, treating unfamiliar people as friends rather than strangers.