Ugandan Meetings - The Long And The Not So Short Of It

Hello everyone. This is Floyd.

Having spent a good majority of my time at New Hope in the business office, I have been able to experience how Ugandans (at least these Ugandans) manage the operation and conduct business on a daily basis. As with all businesses, meetings are an essential and at times necessary part of business communication. I have found (to this point at least) a vast difference between American meetings and Ugandan meetings; both in content and duration.

American meetings can go long. As a rule meetings always seem to go longer than they should and there is many a businessman who spends the vast majority of his day bouncing from meeting to meeting. In fact, one the most annoying and perplexing facets of American business is the continuous need to have a meeting simply to discuss and prepare for another meeting that is scheduled (or not yet scheduled). It is this monotonous drudgery that can make a businessman collapse at the end of the day. Meetings for meetings just seems a bit ridiculous. But American meetings can be extremely short and to the point if run by people of  certain personality types. For them, they don't need to know you nor do they want to. They just want to get down to business.

But things are quite the opposite here in Uganda. Meetings can take hours upon hours. I have only been in the business office for a total of about 3 and half days and have already witnessed multiple 4-6 hour meetings and was part of a rather long meeting myself. The meeting I was in was only an hour and a half but it should have only taken 30 minutes. There is so much time spent in the relationship process that there is absolutely no hurry to get to the business part of it. It is so funny to watch the Americans (yours truly included) in the Ugandan meetings. You can see so clearly how badly they want to "get down to business" while the Ugandans greet each other and discuss how the family is and how their evening was, and how the morning meal was, and how the weather is, and how much they enjoyed their porridge at 10:00 this morning, and how the crops are doing, and how someone's uncle left a heater on and almost burned the house, and so on. All of these things that would be considered "water cooler talk" in American is common discussion in the meeting room in Uganda.

Also, Ugandan conversation is much slower and reserved than American. There can be great pauses as the person considers carefully what they want to say and how they want to say it. This can go on for long periods of time as there is a careful consideration not to say anything that can or might in some way be found offensive to another. Ugandans can say "no" in such a way that you never realize you were just told no. They were so darn nice about it, you really don't even mind that they said no....without saying no.

Anyway...I thought is was interesting and certainly a change from things in the States. Things are so peaceful here. I have always wanted to live in the country and have some land that I could stretch out on and hear nature every morning. Africa certainly provides all of the above. More to come...