(photo credit: Kim Scarborough)
1. In Tajikistan, where I currently live, and in Central Asia in general, married women wear scarves on their heads. So do unmarried women older than about 25. It’s not a religious thing at all. It’s just what women do. Visitors often come to Tajikistan for a week and leave thinking that it’s a deeply religious country because of all the women wearing hijab. If you either a) asked someone or b) knew enough about Islam to know what a hijab has to cover, you wouldn’t make that mistake. But people don’t know, and they don’t ask. They walk around, they make assumptions, they go home and share their misinformation.
2. In order to graduate from my alma mater, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, you have to be proficient in a foreign language. My roommate and I both chose French. In the weeks leading up to our proficiency exams, we spoke French to each other at all times to practice. Once, I heard someone comment as we walked by, “That’s why I love Georgetown – the constant exposure to other cultures.”
That’s my convoluted way of saying we get things wrong all the time. Sometimes our science is bad, sometimes we haven’t bridged the culture gap as securely as we’d like, sometimes we’ve made so many compromises that we ended up somewhere we don’t belong. Some of that we can prevent. Both of my examples above could be prevented through spending more time and doing more research.
We can’t prevent all of it. As long as our programs are designed and run by human beings rather than infallible robots, mistakes will happen.
We do, however, need a resilient system to catch our mistakes and a corporate culture that lets us make changes when we realize we’ve screwed up. We can catch our mistakes through monitoring and evaluation. That means not just collecting data, but looking at it, thinking about what it means, and using that meaning to guide program decisions. And we can keep our errors to a minimum by cultivating an atmosphere where people are encouraged to admit their mistakes. If you maternal and child health director realizes that the patient education classes aren’t doing anything, she needs to be free to re-design the curriculum or cancel the activity and spend the money on childbirth kits.
Re: bridging the culture gap.
This is one of my pet peeves: people going to work in a country (or just visiting a project briefly) with zero knowledge of the culture and thus no sense of context for what they see and experience.
When I was in Bosnia, I made some dumb, embarrassing mistakes in my first few weeks, but I dare say I made fewer dumb, embarrassing mistakes than some of the older, better-educated expats who didn’t even have an academic background in the Balkans or any friends from the region back home.
Worse yet are people with no cultural knowledge and an overabundance of bravado, who love to make sweeping and absolute statements about “these people” or “these [insert nationality].”
Being young and inexperienced career-wise, it’s frustrating to hear people twice my age make statements that betray a dangerous lack of knowledge about country I’ve spent years studying and trying to understand precisely *because* development isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Without background knowledge on culture (and history, and politics, and gender-relations, and class differences, and demographics, etc), people form opinions and make priorities based on sensory experiences. The Tajik hijab is a good example. Sometimes this is just funny, but more often it leads to bad decisions, to resources being allocated in wasteful, nonsensical ways, and to offending local partners.
But it’s preventable.
One of my current colleagues works on a project in Afghanistan. He knew very, very little about Afghanistan when he first started working on the project, but resolved to change that. He voraciously consumed the literature. He started talking to Afghans in the US, including recent refugees. When he traveled to Kabul, he made it a point to eat with the national staff every day, not the other expats. And he said things like, “please correct me if I’m wrong on this” and “honestly, I don’t understand A. Can you explain A to me?”
Humility is important. Humility allows you to correct mistakes, and can prevent them from being made in the first place.
Great points. (The story about speaking French is funny. I get a different reaction when speaking Indonesian – often shock.)
Making mistakes is essential to the learning experience. When I talk to people learning English I emphasize this. Happily being willing to make mistakes can earn a lot of respect (and good natured laughs) when combined with an very high openness to learning.
I think “transitionland” has it about right. For me it comes down to two essential things:
– Humility (as transitionland mentioned), hopefully accompanied by a willingness to learn.
– attention to nuance when speaking/writing (transitionland alludes to this): the use of phrases like, “In my opinion…”, “I think that…”, “From my perspective…”, etc.
Maybe there’s a third as well: Humor. The ability to laugh at ourselves when we make those dumb cross-cultural mistakes. And more generally, the ability to not take ourselves so seriously.
Cultural awareness is one of those things that requires personal commitment over a sustained period of time because it both requires that one give an effort, and that one makes mistakes.
Influencing others, or creating a ‘system’, is a bit harder because how do you create a system that makes others care? Education goes a long way, but at the end of the day cultural awareness stems from self awareness, and the latter is much harder to teach.
Are you back living overseas? Tajikistan? I thought you were US based? Hope you are enjoying it if you have made the move… we are looking for ways back to Afghanistan…
Phil – yes, we’re in Dushanbe. It’s really nice to be closer to the work.
Do you seriously want to go back to Afghanistan?
yeah. definitely. I guess we could try Tajikistan. At least we could speak the language. But Afg is first priority. Maybe not Kabul- the degrading security there really made things quite unfun. But Mazar perhaps.
I think that’s a great point you make about being allowed to make mistakes. I often find in the NGO world that making a mistake is just not allowed. But isn’t that the most effective way of learning?