Saturday, May 21, 2011

When gardens grow faster than meetings happen


Written on April 29, 2011

Hey everyone,

Guipelile, mu vu kuile? That’s Chitswa for good evening, how are you? (Pronounced: gee-peh-LEE-leh, moo voo-KEE-leh, in case you were wondering).

So as you can tell from my greeting, I’ve decided that, even though my Portuguese still needs work, I want to try and learn some of the local language to better understand what’s going on around me. Because the thing is, most people at work and around town only speak Portuguese if they’re talking directly to me. Otherwise they speak Chitswa to one another, and a lot of people don’t speak much Portuguese at all. It’s not really a written language so it’s hard to find resource materials. But I have a rough manual that Peace Corps pieced together and a tutor lined up who is going to trade me Chitswa for English... so we’ll see!

But language is not the only challenge on my mind these days. To be honest, there are parts of my work and life here that are hard to talk about in a blog because they’re complicated and I don’t want to be negative or pass judgment on things I’m still struggling to understand. But I wouldn’t be doing this experience justice if I didn’t try to talk about these challenges, because they’re some of the central issues I deal with on a daily basis.

Like what? Well, the way my last two weeks went is one example. Ever since I got back from the conference in Maputo, I’ve been raring to go. It’s like something clicked and I realized, with a shock, that I’ve been here in Mabote for almost five months—nearly a quarter of the way through my two years! There are a lot of things that I want to do here and it suddenly seems like there’s just not enough time to do it all.

Why not? Two years is a long time, right? Maybe you’ve heard this adage: what takes an hour in the U.S. takes a day in Africa; what takes a day in the U.S. takes a month in Africa; and what takes a month in the U.S. takes a year in Africa. I had heard this before I came here, but I thought it must be an exaggeration.

But based on my short experience here, it’s not too far from the truth. The main problem I keep hitting up against is people’s tendency not to plan ahead. It’s not that they don’t get things done – god knows my colleagues at the association would put me to shame if you compared the amount of work we do in a day.

But a lot of people I know here seem to just decide what to do next at each moment. And if they do make plans, there’s a good chance something else will come up and whatever they had planned will start late, or just won’t happen that day. One reason for this is that to them, people always trump plans. That’s great if you’re the person interrupting someone’s plans because you need something, but it’s not so great if you’re the person they made plans with who is now sitting and waiting.

If we’re in a meeting and their phone rings, they answer it and have their conversation. If we’re in the middle of doing something and a neighbor walks up and asks to borrow our scale, but it’s locked inside the storage room and we don’t have the key, they will wander off to go help them find another scale to borrow from the neighboring association. And they may not come back for an hour, probably because they’re sitting and visiting.

One colleague in particular is the queen of this type of thing. When I got back from the conference I asked her if we could sit down and check-in about some things we left off on before I went to Maputo and make a plan for moving ahead. How long would it take in the U.S. to schedule and have one meeting? Maybe a day or two, right? Well, it took us two weeks. It didn’t happen until today and the meeting fell through four times. That is, I sat at the association waiting on her for a several hours, usually by myself in the yard, four different times.

But to be fair, I know it’s not just cultural tendencies. I can’t ignore the very real obstacles they are up against that I just don’t have to deal with. For one thing, there’s a lot more illness and death in their lives. Two of the four times our meeting fell through, it was at least partially because my colleague was sick and had to go to the hospital to get medicine. It wasn’t anything serious, but there are no private pharmacies in Mabote so if you even want something as basic as Tylenol you have to go to the hospital.

And the association was quieter than usual this week (which was why I was sitting around by myself) because, of the three most active members, two of them had a death or serious illness in their family. Not only that, but another member had to be taken to the hospital in the provincial capital, Inhambane City, this week because she’s having a complication from a chronic illness. She accidentally took some of the office keys with her so we were partially locked out. All these things happening at the same time and hampering our ability to get work done is not a coincidence – it’s just the reality of life here.

They also just do a whole lot; it’s common for people to have multiple professions or ways of providing for their family. The colleague I’ve been trying to meet with, for example, has three jobs: home-based care with our association, cashew processing with another association, and she’s a vender at the market. She also goes to school at night (8th grade); is involved in her church and the Mozambican organization of young people; is a single mom of a toddler; and then of course there are the daily tasks of life here like farming, cooking over firewood, and carrying water.

So maybe what looks to me like running around like a chicken with its head cut off is an understandable response to all of the demands of their lives. Because one thing is clear to me: life here is uncertain and closer to the edge. It seems like the mentality is: why worry about next week when it’s enough just to get through this one?

And besides, by next week, anything could happen. Not just personal things, but it’s typical to find out about important deadlines and events from our donor organization or the government just a few days in advance. And it doesn’t seem to phase my colleagues at all. They just scramble to pull things together, and in the meantime anything we had planned falls by the wayside.

So the end result of all of this is that by the end of the month, my calendar looks like a tic-tac-toe board with X’s crossing out the things we had planned that didn’t happen for one reason or another. And me understanding it somewhat doesn’t make it any less maddening when I’m sitting there by myself waiting to see if the colleague in question is ever going to show up to a meeting we agreed upon. No… when it happens on a regular basis I can’t just excuse it away, blaming it on cultural differences or poverty.

Or rather, it is due to both cultural differences and the consequences of poverty, but that doesn’t make it “right”, for lack of a better word. And I don’t think I’d be doing them any favors by not pointing out that it’s counterproductive. I’m not saying that my culture is always “right”, either, and I spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out when to adapt to their way of doing things, and when try to get them to adapt to my way of doing things (not necessarily in this situation, but just in general). When am I helping them develop, and when am I just imposing my culture or ignoring realities?

There are no easy answers, and sometimes I feel like a dog chasing its tail.

But we did finally have our meeting today! I thought it went well; we talked about these problems with planning and communication and have some ideas of things we can do that might help. For one thing, we’re going to get some chalk paint in Vilankulos and make a chalkboard calendar on the wall to better track things and hold people accountable for showing up to meetings (I would say “on time” but that’s probably wishful thinking). It’s a start, anyway. And after the week I had, it felt like a major victory.

One of the things that keeps me sane at times like these is finding other ways of keeping busy. This week I sort of joined a soccer team at the primary school with a few of the teachers and some of the students – all ages, since a lot of adults go to primary school at night, but it’s mostly teenage girls who play. My English class also started, and I take great pleasure in showing up early and starting exactly at 6:15pm, the time we agreed upon, even if there are only two people there at the beginning. This is English class and we’re on American time, damnit! I told them that and they all laughed, but they still don’t show up on time…

And since machamba (small farming) season is coming to a close along with the rainy season and it’s now horta-planting time (vegetable gardens), I started one of my own last week at the association. Even if it took two weeks to have one meeting, at least my plants are growing! It’s something visible happening, and some days I need that.

That’s all for now. I’m off to bed. Big wedding to go to tomorrow.

Salani kwatzi, (goodbye in Chitswa)
Julie

P.S. Some of you are probably thinking how wonderfully ironic it is that I, who have been chronically late all my life, am complaining about other people making me wait. I officially apologize to anyone I ever left waiting on me (um, everyone I know). Maybe this experience will cure me of my lateness problem. You can remind me later that I said that…

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