I'm not getting you...

There’s a lot to be misheard when you start talking about cross-cultural/continental communication. This past week there were a few occasions where miscommunication led to frustration between several different parties. I’ll just list them off in no particular order and see if they can be tied together coherently at the end.

1. Getting soft copies to our auditors in Burkina Faso. This one probably comes as no surprise to anyone, but it turns out that sometimes when you try to send attachments from Cameroon to Burkina Faso things get complicated. Complication one – I don’t even bother trying sending things as attachments anywhere anymore, instead I put things into a DropBox folder, let them upload for a few hours, then ask my co-workers in the US to send them as attachments when they get them. (This kind of reminds me of the pseudo-GPS we probably all did back when Google maps was available but GPS devices weren’t- you know when you got lost with only a cross-street to let you know where you are and you called someone who could look up where you were on a PC to direct you street by street back on track). (Sidebar – The documents did eventually get to their final destination after Ben in VT pulled out all the stops and sent them by about 4 different avenues. It was serious...they even tried faxing them).

2. My fancy new phone (a T-mobile) with all sorts of cool features just can’t seem to connect to the internet despite all signs indicating that it should. This one made the above more frustrating as I felt like I ought to be better connected.

3. At the start of last week we were geared up to keep buying coffee with the word being that we were looking for another 24 tons from Oku based on projections from our buying partners. This was exciting since we have plenty of farmers and small buyers who still have coffee to sell and we were still offering the best price in town. Unfortunately, after starting to set a program for visiting different parts of the village the word came from the same partners that they didn’t want us to buy anymore. This change of course led to a series of unpleasant phone calls and meetings on the street where myself and Cassman had to disappoint a whole bunch of people (but really...unless you are some kind of big time speculator who sees a big shift in the coffee market on the horizon [which you aren’t if you live in Oku], just sell your coffee before the end of February).

4. Was supposed to meet my co-workers at a training meeting yesterday morning and could not get any information from or about them when they never arrived. Until late this morning I heard nothing due to bad network reception and a phone that met an untimely end in a latrine. Certainly I could have walked to where they stay to find out what was up, but it’s about an hour hike so it wasn’t feasible last night and frankly didn’t seem that urgent until just before they showed up at my own door. When you are cut off from a group of people like that you can feel like you’re out in space and extra weight is added to every decision, for example, ‘should I go get myself some lunch? What if they come by the house and I’m not there? I should wait. Should I go up there? But it’s so far, and what if they’ve gone out themselves or we pass each other on different paths...!?!’

On the flip side, here are some positive communication developments:

1. My Oku language is actually kind of getting somewhere. I’m nowhere near able to speak or comprehend it in a useful way, but I can string some sentences together and sometimes get myself understood. The people of Oku don’t have much practice speaking slowly for foreigners, so that’s a handicap.

2. Incidentally, I’m sometimes convinced that no one around here is that much better at

communicating with one another even using the local dialect than I am speaking whatever language I’m trying to use. I see this sometimes when after two people finish a discussion I didn’t understand I ask each of them what it was about and get almost polar opposite explanations. To be fair, much of this can be chalked up to willful misunderstanding/selective hearing that characterizes lots of the informal business deals that happen in a village like Oku.

3. Got to have about three nice conversations with people in the US in the past week: two with my parents and one with my boss Pierre (who will incidentally be traveling to Cameroon himself this week).

4. I have adopted a new strategy for getting people to my training meetings using SMS reminders. Yeah it costs a bit, but it is a very positive departure from my obstinate ‘I told you when the meeting was a month ago, why can’t you just remember it yourself’ attitude. Really, if getting someone to these meetings isn’t worth $0.10 to me (out of my expense budget no less) then I should probably re-evaluate the value of the meetings all together.

So, common threads? I kind of expected modern technology to be one, but not really, cell phones and the internet both disappointed and supported me and the Oku language isn’t really modern, though the efforts to formalize that are helping me so much in learning are only a few decades old. Language is always an underlying theme while working in Cameroon, so it is no surprise that a few items on my list are centered on it. One common feature among all those items above is patience and understanding. None of the frustrations can be solved by getting annoyed and the positive items generally stem from going the extra step to communicate effectively. So if I’m not getting you, the first thing I need to do is take a breath.