The loud wrong songs

Sometimes when speaking in or reading our own language, we can be fooled into thinking we are communicating in our own culture. The idea of what constitutes items in a category is often what seems to fool people. I remember when I was traveling in Uganda and a city planner was complaining about a lack of zoning.
"They are building night clubs and churches right in the neighborhoods. It is terrible."
When I first heard this, I applied my own U.S. American, Puritan, framework. I interpreted him to be saying,
"Isn't it awful that you can build a den of drinking and sin right next to the house of the lord."
However, after a difficult night of trying to sleep with the sounds of music and merry making pouring out the the nightclub and into my window, then being worken up at the crack of dawn with enthusiastic Pentecostal exclamations of faith out of the church and in through my window, did I really understand the Ugandan urban planner. He was talking about the noise. I had forgotten how loud churches are in Africa.

Here is an intercultural test. Read the sign below. What doesn't fit the series.



Intercultural Tip: We group things in categories to make our minds efficient. However, these categories are culturally constructed and may need readjusting.