Poka-poka
African sense of time is well known to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from North American. I knew this and realized that I would be challenged by it. I thought that knowing in advance would prepare me. It has not.
The facilitators and I joke about it. At one point someone asked for 10 min for a break to go to the bank. I said “an African 10 minutes or the clock 10 minutes?” We all laughed and it has become a standing joke. However I have to admit that many times I have been coping with my frustration which was bubbling under the surface much of the time. My agenda is to prepare them to do a job. However our sense of priorities are sometimes very different.
Here is an example. Last week there was a misunderstanding which ruffled some feathers, due to a hurried and somewhat blunt email sent by one of my colleagues. It was the beginning of the day and I had an agenda that involved catching up from previous days lagging. However, the email had to be discussed. Everyone had to express how they felt. Then everyone had to describe how things should have been handled differently. Then everyone had to say what they wanted to happen now. All this took 1.5 hours. The person who had ruffled feathers was not there, so Monday morning we had to start again with everyone expressing themselves about it and that was another hour devoted to this issue. Now, normally I would say that expressing oneself is a good thing. However, I would not have imagined that these things could have taken quite so long!
This is called, here, poka poka (slow, slow). It is the opposite of wiki-wiki, a Hawian name for fast-fast. We are working in online collaboration tools that are called wikis so poka poka has become a bit of a joke amongst us. Certain things need to be done poka poka and repairing relationships is just one of those things.
We are starting to adapt to each other. This week I don’t push them so much. I’ve come to the conclusion that the things that need to get done will get done, maybe not in quite the way I had imagined. I let them decide how the day should go and they are starting to take more responsibility for how time is managed and achieving the outcomes for the day. Today they said that they need to be time management role models for the students. Now, that is a real coupe!