Intercultural Situations

I recall this incident from my backpacking trip last year. During this trip, one particular incident in the capital of Laos, Vientiane, taught me the importance of good and effective communication as well as a good understanding of the host country’s culture. As it was, my partner and me had just arrived in Vientiane after a marathon bus ride of twenty hours from the Cambodia-Laos border and I was in desperate need of a toilet.

Since it was the early hours of the day and we had to find suitable lodging for the Vientiane leg of our trip, we proceeded to check out the numerous motels around the area first. In one of the particular motel, I took the liberty of using their guest toilet after taking a look at the rooms. This was where the whole problem lied. As we were leaving the motel after having found the rooms a bit too dusty for our liking, the receptionist, whom I presume to be the owner of the motel, stopped us at the door. She was yelling at me in Lao and a mixture of her limited knowledge of English. It turned out that she believed I was taking advantage of her toilet with no intention of staying in her motel at all when the truth was that I had conveniently used her toilet after checking her available rooms. Apparently the Laos believe that the first customer of the day was the most important and they try as much as possible to seal the first deal that comes by. In this unfortunate episode, I was her first customer and in her devastated mind all I really wanted to do was to take a quick pee. She insisted on charging me 5USD for the use of the toilet. Each. The result was that I had to pay 15 Singapore dollars in order to relieve myself when I had the Mekong River right next to her motel.

This episode taught me the importance of understanding foreign culture and the powers of effective communication. I could have explained my actions to the lady if only I understood her.

Research Project

After much deliberation, our group decided to do a research on the topic of delayed parenthood. This topic was brought up during this year’s national rally and has been a mainstay of much of our national discussion for some time.

The title for our research project is “Delayed Parenthood among NUS Students” and for our research question we would like to know why the higher educated population of Singapore are not willing to procreate. Besides this, we would also like to find out what would be a good incentive for NUS students to have children in the future. Our hypothesis is that with better employees’ welfare, we can encourage NUS students to have babies in the future. With our project, we have limited ourselves to just NUS students because we know that in a few years they will be joining the workforce and their current attitude towards having children will be important if they were to start parenthood early. Besides this, we are excluding cases of unwanted pregnancies. We want to do a research case whereby both mother and father are ready and willing to step into parenthood together.

Problem Statement

The objective of this study is to analyze if having better employees’ welfare will encourage NUS students to have babies.

Audience

The target audiences of the research project are the relevant authority in Ministry of Manpower and NUS students.

Tentative Purpose Statement

One of the objectives of this report is to inform the Ministry of Manpower the attitude of NUS students towards having children. We also hope to inform them of the positive effects on our birthrate with better employees’ welfare.
The second objective is to encourage NUS students to have babies in the future.

Methodology

Survey will be used to gain NUS students’ opinion regarding the issues on delayed parenthood. One hundred survey forms will be distributed to 3rd and 4th year NUS students randomly.
We will also be working with literature review found on websites, newspaper and relevant advertisement, etc.