New Fitting Group creative services intern, Beckie, blogs about her experience with handling culture shock.

In my opinion, I’ve lived a sheltered life. I grew up in a rural area, two hours from any major city, fifteen minutes from a decent-size town in Maryland and forty-five minutes from my 600-student high school in Pennsylvania. Up until this past December, I had never been further than Orlando, Florida, and I had never been on an airplane (yes, we drove for 15 hours).

But I finally got my chance to break these boundaries. My fiancé’s sister, Ashley, is currently living in Honduras teaching math at a bilingual school. His family invited me to go with them for two weeks to visit her and sightsee. We flew out of Baltimore on December 18th to the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa.

Walking around Tegucigalpa and our second destination, Juticalpa, nearly everyone stared at me. I also knew very little Spanish. It was extremely unnerving. I was prepared to stick out like a sore thumb, and I knew I would have trouble communicating, but I was not prepared for the overwhelming feeling of panic.

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