Cultural Stereotypes

So the 2nd day went by as quickly as the sleep I've been getting in Nairobi (endless works had kept me up late at night unfortunately.)

We arrived early at 9am and we prepped until classes started at 10am.

It's interesting in our concept of stereotyping cultures. The few days that we had spent here have taught us what "African time" means-- if you want someone to arrive promptly at, for say, 9am, you'd tell them to arrive at 8:30am. To combat this concept, we had purposefully start off our morning with a Q+A (unstructured), in hope to combat this cultural norm.

But interestingly, perhaps as results of setting group norms, expectations, or even as simple as respect, the youths surprisingly arrived at ten to 10am. Another surprise came when Patrick, one of the four youths with the winning proposal, came into the door and showed us his homework-- 4 assigned pages fully completed. We really didn't expect much of these youths will actually do their homework (perhaps we are thinking of ourselves in Canada). Are stereotypes always true? Of course not.

We had a finance workshop today with Dr Waema-- a finance professor/ banker from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Nairobi. He commented of how pleased he was with our choice of location-- somewhere convenient to our participants, and somewhere which reflected the current hardships-- not anywhere fancy, intimidating, which further exaggerated the class differences. He talked on for about two and a half hours, and surprising the youths were listening sincerely, taking notes, and fully participating. This is so unlike any university lectures that I've ever sat on. To sum up Dr. Waema's charismatic speech, "opportunities is all that are needed, and poverty is in our hands to eliminate."

On a side note, we hope to quantify our education successes. We gave the youths a test today and we are going to give the same test by the end of our project, in hope for some significant improvements. The results were not bad: mean-- 63%; median-- 57%. But of course, we hope that in about two weeks time, everyone will be in the 90's range-- or at least that's what all teachers hope in every class that they teach.

And for myself, Dr. Waema discussed his interest in researching about cultural management practices-- and specifically in African Management characteristics (I'm sure we've heard of the Japanese Management, North American management etc.) And suddenly I'm thinking: that will be SOOOO interesting! Perhaps I'll look into it, and see if I can find myself another excuse to come to this amazing continent! (And plus, it's management research; something I'm truly excited about!)


Posted by Eiston Lo