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Stories from the field

Stories from the field

Tales from a Western nomad

Learning from and adapting to a different culture can be confronting. Development practitioner Jorgen Jensen shares some insights.

My son is turning seven in a couple of months. His first language is English, but he started out in Spanish and later Danish, before learning his new mother tongue English. He is now living in his third continent and he has been around the world three times in his short life. He is a happy boy with incredible skills to observe, learn and adapt to constant changes and the new environments and cultures he is being exposed to.

Being a Western nomad or a development practitioner on both short-term and long-term assignments in developing countries has its price, but most certainly it also has its rewards. For me, the tales of almost 20 years of travelling have by far been more rewarding than costly. They have been rewarding from a personal point of view, but also from a professional one, with constant challenges of understanding, appreciating and learning from local habits and ways of doing business.

As a development practitioner specialising in human resources and organisational development, understanding human behaviour and the cultural dimension to development has been an ongoing challenge to my work. As a Team Leader or Program Manager you are constantly challenged by inter-personal and cultural issues and views on the world, both by likeminded Western colleagues as well as local partners.

My very first appreciation of and learning experience from a non Western way of thinking was when I went on my first long-term posting in South America. I had only just arrived and had been in my new office for one week when Pedro, who later became one of my best friends and work colleagues, invited me out for a weekend tour to see my new country of residence. Pedro had told me that he would pick me up at my hotel at around 9 am. I had read about Latin American "mañana" (tomorrow) culture, but what I didn't realize was that 9 am in his culture could be anytime between 8am and 11 am. He picked me up at 11 am and I was furious and disappointed. I told him what I felt and his immediate response was "why are you in such a hurry - what is it that you have to achieve?"

It took me a long time to understand what he meant, but once I started to reflect on what he was trying to tell me, I realised my own Westernised perception of time which requires predictability, logical and rational boundaries, and certainty. I was brought up in a culture where time is money that shouldn't be wasted. This little and in principle insignificant incidence generated many new discussions between us about cultural differences and perceptions, learning and adaptability.

Acknowledging that he probably should have called me, Pedro taught me to relax in order to survive in a new culture. He helped me to utilise waiting time as an opportunity of time suddenly provided. He challenged my management skills on emerging and unpredicted changes not pre-designed or planned as I would like them to be. He questioned my ability to utilise an opportunity to do things spontaneously and to challenge my creativity. I was for a moment not supposed to do something as planned or requested. Emerging "extra-time" suddenly could become my opportunity of reflection and even a moment for innovation. Pedro taught me the importance of understanding culture and factors of human behaviour, which is essential when designing, implementing and evaluating development interventions.

The importance of understanding human behaviour and culturally determined factors when working in a developing country is not new to the development community, but we tend to forget these factors in our desire and eagerness to transfer our skills and knowledge.

We, the development practitioners, are more and more expected to be facilitators of change- and assist people to change their livelihoods in their preferred direction. What Pedro told me was, if you don't understand how people think, how they behave, or what makes perfect sense to them, you will run into all sorts of frustrations, agony and eventually jeopardise your development intensions.

Understanding and adapting to local traditions and norms is, or should be, the fun part of our job. Appreciating cultural richness and diversity, getting into the mindsets of human beings to understand behaviour and life experiences from a different world, is the gold and greatest rewards of all. Understanding Pedro was a very rewarding experience for me and a great fertilizer to my personal development as a practitioner.

Jorgen Skytte Jensen, born in Denmark, is a development practitioner in the fields of human and organisational capacity development. He has worked in more than 10 different countries in four continents and has been working with Hassall & Associates International in Canberra as Manager of their Development Impact Group since 2006.

• Images courtesy of Jorgen Jensen.