On Conflict and Consensus

In my experience, a volunteer organization's ability to help others hinges on its organizational structure and culture- its formal leadership, informal leadership, meetings, etc. Most groups really focus on the formal leadership and hierarchical decision making, at the expense of mentorship, consensus building and the input of the least powerful.

Many people claim that mentoring volunteers and getting their input takes too much time. In our Engineers Without Borders chapter, which has a membership of 40+ persons, it seems like that idea only holds up in the short term, if at all. In the mid term, including others and taking the time to build trust with them saves the organization many meetings, headaches and drama. In the long term, it takes less time and produces better results.

Intuitively, the emphasis on formal structures e.g. president, vp etc. running the whole show, and hierarchical decision making makes a lot of sense to many volunteers. It takes most people many volunteer hours to realize that hierarchical decision making is not a very efficient model. It prefers the loudest voices and the people who are most privileged in this world. It causes many organizations to lose the skills and volunteer hours of those who don't have the loudest voices or deepest pockets. Thus using it as the m.o. of an organization that aims to serve poor people in Kenya doesn't make much sense to me.

The problem is that there are not a lot of well-known alternatives to chose from, especially when it comes to running meetings for organizations with a large membership. This summer Quinn and I came across this handbook "On Conflict and Consensus," at a bookstore in Philadelphia. Most of it fits with the lessons about running a volunteer organization that I've learned from volunteering with EWB. We'll see how it goes. We are hoping to be able to try it out in EWB this fall.


http://www.ic.org/pnp/ocac/

wandreilagh.org/consensus.pdf for a free copy in PDF form

FAIL

Tuna, Shrimp, Margherita, Strawberry or Greek in a cone!

Restaurant Review: Haandi Udupi, Indian Food, Westgate Mall, Nairobi

Haandi Udupi is an Indian restaurant in the food court of Nairobi's Westgate Mall. I had never visited a Kenyan food court before. As soon as we arrived, waiters from each of the food court restaurants raced over to us and handed us about 10 laminated menus. We were in it for the Indian food, and Haandi Udupi had a very extensive menu. Northern Indian, Southern Indian, Indian that I'd never heard of. Five pages of it, all with their authentic names and no English translations. It overwhelmed me and all I could remember was that paneer is tofu-like cheese. Quinn and I both settled for vegetable dishes because we thought it would be safer to experiment with veggies than meat.

Vegetable Korma (pictured in front of Quinn)
Vegetable Chaana
2 orders of warm, crispy, buttered naan
2 large passion fruit juices
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1,000 ksh approx. $12.50 USD

The food was served on tidy white plates, and I was in Indian food heaven.

Cultural Norm

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This is an angry post.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. e.g. I'm standing in line, putting in my dinner order at the hostel in Nairobi. I've been waiting in line for five minutes. Some guy walks up to the counter. He has a crumpled bill in his hand. I am just about to open my mouth to tell the waitress what I'd like for dinner, when he extends his money to the waitress and she promptly stops paying attention to me. She takes his order. I look at him, momentarily surprised that he’d budge in line. Frustration wells up. The scenario is all too familiar. He did such an obvious job of budging. I stare at his face, trying to make him look at me, trying to make him uncomfortable. He won’t meet my eyes.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. At first, I wondered whether I was missing something, perhaps there were details in the systems for buying or ordering food, bus tickets, groceries etc. that I did not know about because I was a foreigner. I noticed that none of our male, Kenyan partners budged in front of us, in fact they were very courteous. Then, I started thinking about whether the guys who budged in line were simply jerks. You know- jerks, just like the American version. People who, for some reason, nature and/or nurture, consistently behave in rude ways.

A couple weeks ago, after being in Kenya for two months, I was standing in line to buy airtime for my phone. A twelve-year-old Kenyan boy of Indian descent used the small size of his body to get in front of me and cut me off. Budging in line, I soon realized, is a cultural norm amongst many Kenyans. So is treating women as second-class citizens. It's a complex topic that I'm only familiar with of because of these frustrating scenarios. I apologize for the oversimplifications- I'm annoyed! For the moment, all I know is that many females, such as the dinner waitress who took the guy’s order, are also implicated.

Medical School- The Numbers, The Facts

I am in the process of applying to medical schools. This morning, I discovered something interested when reading a NYtimes article called "Getting Into Medical School Without Hard Sciences." It turns out that Mount Sinai in NYC, one of the med schools I applied to, offers medical school slots to students who studied liberal arts during undergrad, didn't take hard sciences and didn't take the MCAT. The part that fascinated me- The leaders of that Mount Sinai program just produced a peer-reviewed study that shows their "liberal arts" students perform as well as students who stressed hard over the MCAT and organic chemistry.

Here's the study:
"Challenging Traditional Premedical Requirements as Predictors of Success in Medical School: The Mount Sinai School of Medicine Humanities and Medicine Program," by David Muller, MD and Nathan Kase, MD. Published in Academic Medicine, 85:5, August 2010.

Although the metrics of success could be expanded a bit, I think the study is very useful.

I earned my B.A. from McGill University, and took premedical courses at Montana State after I graduated. It's always been hard for me to believe that the students in my class whose lives revolve around their statistics on paper (GPA, MCAT score etc.) were going to make good doctors. I still believe in learning the fundamentals of science before going into medical school, just because when I switched from mostly liberal arts to premedical courses it took me a while to get the hang of how to learn scientific concepts. But the study fits with my intuitive understanding of what makes a good physician. My self-bias about the study is huge because my own statistics on paper are not competitive with many of my peers, yet I'm pretty sure that I'm going to thrive in medicine.

This is what my application would look like to people who are focused on just the statistics:

Cumulative GPA: 3.41
Science GPA: 3.39
MCAT: 26 M. i.e. 9 in verbal, 7 in physical sciences (general chemistry + physics), 10 in biology (biology + organic chemistry), and M in writing (scored w/ J-T, low to high).

This is more like what my app might look like to people who look beyond the statistics and/or understand what makes them:

1.) I went to an undergrad institution where arts classes were usually challenging
2.) Ever since the summer after I started at MSU I have worked as a caregiver, day and night shifts
3.) Engineers Without Borders has been just as much of a time commitment for me as my premed classes. When I'm sitting in premed classes, many of which are taught by rocks of professors who are often symptomatic of a broken feedback loop in which they are completely clueless about the mediocre quality of their teaching skills, it's so much more tempting to throw myself into the kind of work that I will be able to do in medical school and beyond- directly helping people.
4.) I decided to move back home with my parents for the first year of my premed studies. That saved money but costs me a lot of time and energy, as living there is a lot of emotional work.

"Are We Getting Each Other?"

After spending two months in Kenya, there are still many things that I don’t understand. A lot of that probably comes from the language barriers. I don’t speak Kiswahili, Kenya's national language, or Kiluhya, the local language in Khwisero. English is Kenyans’ third language, and western Kenyans use English on a daily basis. However, they don’t get many opportunities to practice making full sentences in English with foreigners. Western Kenyans often use words in Kenyan English that mean different things than those in American English and vice versa.

If I think I understand what someone says, it becomes easy to think that they are always “getting me,” too. Especially because I am the white person with American English and as such the Kenyans sometimes assume that I have better communication skills than them. Upper-level education often makes students think they need to speak in complicated ways and use ivory tower words or silly analogies. So it is not always true that westerners have better communication skills. Have you ever noticed how so much of a college education is learning the language of your particular discipline? Or how each discipline uses slightly different vocabulary to explain the same concept? Because I'm not an engineer and a lot of our projects include lots of engineering and engineers, I often notice this trend when students throw engineering vocabulary at Kenyans, stuff that even I would not understand without access to the internet. 'Cantilever' anyone? The truth is, even though I am trying to be more aware of it, I do it too, except with medical words.

For the most part, the EWB volunteers who have been working here in Khwisero for a while, myself included, are improving at speaking simply and clearly. It’s critical that we do our best with that because it’s a little bit embarrassing for some of the Kenyans to admit they don’t understand. All of those opportunities for lost communication can lead to disastrous results. My personal strategy to minimize that is to explain myself to most western Kenyans in at least two different ways, speaking carefully and using as many Kenyan language-isms as I can. I also ask questions that allow me to check we are “getting each other.”

Here are some western Kenyan English-isms:

“Are we together?” Do you understand what I’m saying?; Are we on the same page?
“Pick” pick me up; take me; take an item
"Isn't it?" Correct?; "non?" in French
"Slowly by slowly" Gradually
"Are you just ok?"
"I am just around" I don't need any public transportation

There are other funky differences, which seem to be a combination of differences in word choice and sentence construction.

e.g. If I wanted to say "Would it be ok with you if we pay the invoice for ballast on Monday?" I would say "I was thinking I will be able to pay on Monday. Is it possible?"


(Photo by Katie Ritter)