Departure day you are even more mindful of the passage of time. You squeeze in last good-byes, run the checklist one last time, make sure you leave in time to catch your flight. You head for the car, cell phone to your ear, wrist in constant rotation so you can check your watch. In the minutes before you board your plane, you open your laptop and check your email.

Depending on your destination, you may be greeted by people who are not wired as extensively as people at home. Every third person may not have a pager and cell phone attached to their belt. More people on the street may carry market baskets than laptops. To experience life as a temporary local, you’ll need to unplug yourself from home.

Turn Off and Tune In
Your group gathers in a community room to hear some women talk about their economic cooperative. The women are sharing their personal stories of struggle and their hard work to make a better life for their families. In the middle of the presentation, your cell phone rings, startling your hosts. You try to step to the back of the room to answer the call. The back of the room is only three steps away.

Pervasive electronic communication which is tolerated in your culture may be misunderstood or seen as offensive somewhere else. When you travel on a mission trip, you are intrusive enough without allowing your entire community from home to interrupt the visit. Staring into the rearview mirror for too long prevents a driver from traveling safely ahead on the road. In the same way, focusing too much on home will keep you from experiencing the people and their lives.

You need to give yourself permission to let go of home for awhile. Adopt a retreat mentality and see your hosts as your spiritual directors. In most instances, the rhythm of life where you are going will be a great a contrast to the rhythm of life at home. Trying to keep the two rhythms going at the same time will be dissonant. Instead of experiencing the subtleties of the music of the place you are visiting, you are likely to get a headache from the noise.

Even if you can accommodate both, you’ll miss a lot of the experience and risk giving the impression that you aren’t really interested in the people who welcomed you. Waiting at a checkpoint may seem like an opportune time to pull out your laptop and work on a report that’s due shortly after your return. But it is also an opportune time for conversation with your hosts, and for tuning in to the effect of the checkpoints in the lives of the people.

Very few cultures in the world operate with as precise attention to the clock as the US culture. Pack away your watch and let the tour leader be the time keeper. Where you are traveling, schedules may be governed by the weather, the chores to be done, the needs of strangers you encounter on your way, or government requirements for identification. Asking about the health of someone’s family may be considered “getting down to business” at a meeting. It may be foolish to rush in your van to a demonstration during a thunderstorm if the local people attending would be walking two miles to get there. Trust your hosts, not the clock or the calendar, to guide you appropriately.

Stay Lightly Tethered
It may be important to have some contact with home. The length and purpose of your visit will help determine what is appropriate. You want to be tethered to home--but lightly so; especially if home is where you plan to land when this trip is over.
Plan ahead for staying in touch. If you are traveling in a group, plan together how to maintain contact with home. Use a phone chain to let your families know you arrive safely. That requires only one phone call from your group, and it puts family members at home in contact with others who are sharing their experience of sending a loved one abroad. Plan for group members to take turns writing a daily update which can be posted on a webboard for family and friends to read.

Plan ahead also for how to bring home along in an unobtrusive way. Looking at a photo of your family after a long day can be as comforting as the hug you usually get at home. Devotional readings that a friend or spouse at home is also reading can provide a common place to begin talking after the trip.

An Attitude of Gratitude
You come from a culture that thrives on experiencing events in “real time.” It is a culture which does not value waiting. It is impossible for those at home to experience your trip moment by moment. Instead of trying to tread two worlds at once and keep everyone “up to the minute,” look for ways to save up the story and tell it as a longer narrative when you get home.

There will be many adjustments you need to make on this trip. This trip may be an opportunity to free yourself for a while from the tyranny of cell phone, pager, wrist watch, email, and the expectation that you are at someone else’s disposal at all times. You will likely have more waiting time than is usual in your life. See this time as a gift. Allow the place where you are, not the demands of home or work, to fill the time and shape your experience. Let the sun of this place finally tan that space on your wrist; and let the stories of the people you meet fill your time.