"Failure to understand culture also affects the way the local community perceives the missionary. In many areas, no cultural equivalent of "missionary" exists. Thus the local people put missionaries into the categories they already know, based on the behavior they observe."
"Bill Eddy, a missionary to Spain, tells of two single Latinas assigned to a village in a rural area of
Spain. Because of the language similarities, they assumed that culture and language learning were unnecessary.
Unaware of the social norms governing single women, the missionaries rented an apartment and. began their ministry. The town would have nothing to do with them. Their ministry suffered, but they had no idea why. After a year of struggling to connect with the people, they tried another tactic and began to teach
Vacation Bible School (YES). Suddenly the people's attitude changed. Why? In this society,
only prostitutes live alone, so the people had concluded that the missionaries were prostitutes. When they began to teach VBS, the villagers realized that they were teachers, not prostitutes! When the missionaries discovered the previous assumption and how their actions had unintentionally fostered it, they immediately began a program of language and cultural study"
(Missiology January 2003 - "Latin Americans and the Global Mission Movement" by Laura Heikes pg77)
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