culture

What we can learn from graffiti

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |


Let’s talk about graffiti. May Karp, a Toronto photographer, went around taking pictures of legally-produced murals and other outdoor graffiti art. Then she blew up the photos very large and displayed and sold them in a gallery show, without providing context or the names of the artists. To her shock and disappointment, the graffiti artists whose work she’d photographed were furious. They banded together and had her show shut down despite her protests that she just wanted to share their unique art with the world. The artists, it seemed, didn’t want to share their talent with the world. They wanted credit and fair pay. (Full story here.)

The really fun part is that this has happened before. A New York dentist collected graffiti photos into a book called “Tattooed Walls,” which also met with outrage from the artists. He also hadn’t thought to credit the artists involved or compensate them.

This is the kind of thing that very easily happens in development work. It’s the kind of blunder made by well-meaning Westerners, especially small NGOs and social entrepreneurs. It’s easy to come in, see a “problem,” and work to solve it instead of taking enough time to listen and learn the true situation. The thing is, though, you have to provide what people actually need. If Ms. Karp or Dr. Rosenstein had made contact with the graffiti artists and asked if they wanted to be part of their projects, they would never have run into trouble, because the artists would have told them no.

If you actually want to help, make it useful and don’t assume you know what useful is. Ms. Karp and Dr. Rosenstein were either too intimidated by graffiti culture to reach out to artists, or too arrogant to even remember their existence. Neither of these are attitudes that lead to useful work.

(Side note: I suspect them of both. Dr. Rosenstein said, “I wanted to bond with them and become friends with them,” but claimed he couldn’t locate the artists. Ms. Karp said she wanted to “preserve these amazing works from the outdoor elements, from the white-wash brigades, even from other artists who paint over them. It is now possible for artists who follow the principles of good art to come in from the outside and show their work on gallery walls.” Since many graffiti artists are shown in galleries, this was breathtaking condescension.)

Finding out what people actually need is an art and a science. There’s a huge body of research devoted to it, which I won’t drag you back through. (Here are a few resources.)

It pretty much boils down to 1) asking people what they need and 2) getting real, quantitative and qualitative data about the situation. It takes some time and effort, but it’s not difficult to do, and it makes the difference between a city full of angry graffiti artists and a treasured labor of love. Once someone tried to talk to them, it became clear that the helpless marginalized artists that Karp and Rosenstein wanted to help and support were neither helpless nor marginalized.

(Art Credit: Artwork by Reyes, Photo by funkandjazz)

The ferry from Nuweiba

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


In spring 1998 I was sitting in a dusty Egyptian ferry terminal waiting to go to Aqaba. On the bench across from me, there sat a man, two women (his wife and her sister, I thought) and a small baby being passed between the women. Eventually, after a flurry of distressed-sounding Arabic, the two women decamped in the direction of the bathroom, leaving the baby with its father. The man held the baby for about a minute, propped in his lap, starting at it and looking discomfited. Then he stood up, looked sheepish, and handed the baby to me. He returned to his newspaper. I sat with the baby, more than a little confused.

I came to the conclusion, while holding that child, that in his own culture, the father had done nothing wrong. In his world, men were bad with babies, inherently. Women were good with babies, inherently. The safest, kindest thing he could do for his child was to hand it off to a woman until mommy returned. A little baby simply did not belong with a man. If he wanted his child to be happy, the best he could do was give it to a woman. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring this out, and for not letting my American cultural biases blind me.

Then, the wife and sister came back, exclaimed with distress at the sight of a strange woman holding the baby, grabbed it from me (with, to be fair, apologetic looks) and spent the next 20 minutes berating the father for his idiocy.

Cultural differences are larger than you could ever imagine, and they matter tremendously. But it’s not always a cultural thing. Sometimes people are just jerks.

(photo of the Aqaba-Nuweiba ferry by Ashraf Al-Mansur)

Not everyone is a sociologist

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

You can’t just choose any random person to be your cultural guide. It makes me completely crazy when people say “My Luisitanian colleague says our poster and brochures are fine” and then assumes their messages are acceptable in Luisitania. One person cannot vouch for everyone in the country.

Most countries are multicultural, including different ethnic and linguistic groups. Not to mention differences between rich and poor, and city and country. It’s not easy to know the tastes and opinions of an entire nation. There’s also a training issue. Your average engineer or doctor from the capital city isn’t in the habit of thinking about the attitudes and mores of everyone around him. An accountant is not an anthropologist.

Most of us can only speak for a limited number of people like ourselves; coming from a developing country doesn’t give you any magic ability to speak for everyone who holds the same passport.

ETA: One great example. The Indian Vogue fashion spread discussed here was designed and shot by Indians.

Expensive translation, cheap food: how a pro runs an international meeting

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


I’ve been to an awful lot of meetings that involve international participants. I’ve seen some go well, and some turn into complete disasters. I spent my last international meeting thinking about what makes some go well, and some go badly, and this is what I came up with:

1. Hire the best translator you can afford. I can’t stress this enough. Do not, under any circumstances, hire language students as translators or expert participants to also translate for others. Your meeting will fail completely if no one is able to understand each other, and I mean that literally. To help the translator, speak in short, clear sentences. If you are using simultaneous translation, speak slowly so the translator doesn’t fall behind. If the translator speaks after you, stop after every other sentence so she can translate. Avoid analogies and metaphors, especially sports metaphors. Anything that requires your translator to stop and figure it out will ruin the flow. Some phrases you may not think of as sports metaphors: gear up, take a shot at it, take a different tack.

2. Some cultures are very uncomfortable introducing themselves, and it can be hard for everyone involved to remember foreign names and faces. If you’re at a table, use placards with names and titles for each person.

3. Have an agenda which explicitly describes each item to be discussed. Think about whether you want to assign a time frame to each item. Meetings intended to share information and form relationships may benefit from being able to take extra time on productive topics and race through dull ones. If decisions need to be made or specific topics covered in detail, a time bound agenda may be useful.

4. Don’t make jokes. They never translate properly.

5. Don’t serve food. Cultural belief on when it’s appropriate to eat, or get up and collect food, differ widely and can lead to frustration or even resentment. Give every attendee a cup and a bottle (or pitcher) of water, and their own little plate of cookies or nuts, and stop there. If you absolutely must have a meal connected to you meeting, schedule it for before or after, and don’t do business during it. Or have coffee breaks and serve snacks there.

6. Know which delegation is hosting, who is chairing the meeting, and who will take the lead on each agenda point. Your chair must be comfortable moving things along to stay with the agenda.

7. Be as candid and informal as your feel comfortable being. Americans are known all over the world for being blunt. You might as well use it to your advantage. Be extremely courteous, but say what you need to say. You don’t have to fit perfectly into the other culture. Just make it very clear you are doing your best to be polite and respectful. Your translator is your ally here; he can make sure your good intentions come through. This is why you paid for the best one you could find.

Photo from John Connell.

Getting the most out of field visits

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

I’ve mentioned in a previous entry that doing the occasional visit to your field programs does not count as in-country experience. If you’re HQ-based, though, or managing several countries, you can’t just move to be close to your sites. Field visits are all you have to get the inside story on your programs and the communities they partner with.

Done right, field visits are a useful tool. They are not as good as living and working in-country, but they’re a lot better than nothing. Here’s how to get the most out of your field visits:

1) Don’t call them missions. That’s just offensive. It’s a field visit, a site visit, or a trip out to see your programs. Unless you are trying to convert people to the one true faith of your choice, it’s not a mission. Calling it one implies that you’re heading out there to teach the locals what’s what. You are heading out there so the locals can teach you. Don’t forget it.

2) Always keep this in mind: your two primary goals in any trip are to learn more about your programs, and more about the context they operate in. You may have specific tasks to achieve on your trip, but if you fail at those your trip still has value as long as you learn.

3) Listen. Talk to people. Talk to your staff. Talk to your beneficiaries. Talk to government officials and community leaders, and taxi drivers. It doesn’t take probing questions, or special insight on your part, just a willingness to sit down and hear what people have to say. Pack your schedule with as many meetings as you can humanly stand. By listening, you learn how your project and organization is perceived, what your community thinks of you, and what your own staff is thinking. You can unearth technical problems and discover what you’re doing well. You also learn about the culture you’re in.

A health educator once told me that they were showing slow behavior change rates in one region because “the women just weren’t very smart there.” That was a major clue that we had a problem in how we thought about education. A doctor my program had trained told me that the most useful thing about our trainings was the chance to talk to other physicians and swap for clinic supplies; we built an extra session into our trainings just for trading. A community leader told me she was sorry our children’s program was closing down in August, which made it clear that the concept of local handover was not being understood.

4) Look. Pay attention, all the time. In Tashkent, the mulberry trees drop their berries to the ground where they rot and make a sticky mess. In Cairo, children climb the trees and pick the berries. Very few fall to the ground. What does it mean? Maybe Egyptian children are hungrier. Maybe Uzbek children are afraid of heights. But it means something, and something you notice now and something you notice later may fit together into information you can use.

Do the traffic police seem to know and like your office driver? An intern once pointed out to me that our information sessions consisted of a male educator standing up while women sat on the ground all around him – what message was that sending? Do your cars have no guns stickers and do your drivers actually follow that rule? How do men and women relate to each other in your host country? How do people treat racial and linguistic minorities?

Much like listening, watching takes no more than your undivided attention. Provide it, and create as many opportunities to look around you as you can. Drive to further-out sites instead of flying, if it’s feasible. Get out of your hotel and take a walk. If you are not a visually observant person, train yourself to become one.

5) Focus your attention on people, not things. If your project repairs water towers, don’t drive out to look at a tower. Instead, talk to your water and sanitation engineers about the rehabilitation process, and talk to the project manager. Talk to people who get their water from the tower. Talk to the mayor of the village the tower is in.

6) Don’t forget women. Don’t forget either gender, but women are far more often overlooked. If none of your meetings are with women, schedule some. Your government officials may be disproportionately male, but the community you work with should not be. If no one in your project can suggest women for you to meet with, something is very, very wrong.

Edited to add: I thought of this in a meeting today – take notes at all your meetings, in a notebook, unless it makes the other person uncomfortable. At the end of every day, transcribe your meeting notes and add anything you noticed during the day. This will help you remember and process what you learned and provide a great basis for your trip report.

Lolita beds?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

Any time I hear about the importance of making sure everything you do is culturally sensitive, I think of problems like this. We can’t even manage to be sensitive to our own culture, more often than not. (For those who read the article – I shall refrain at this point from discussing the British educational system.)