All of these things
have happened to me at least once, but never all in the same meeting, thank
god. But that level of hilarity is
what makes a satire a satire. Ou bien?
So you want to hold a meeting? Maybe your groupement is
starting a seed bank, your NGO is electing a new board, or a group of health
workers is getting trained.
Somehow you need to get your group of people together to have a big
talk.
You decide to have it Saturday afternoon, at 4 PM, after
everyone is done with work and should, technically, be free. Inevitably, some people will by Friday
evening or Saturday morning, curious as to where everyone else is. On the day of the meeting, around noon,
it’s generally a good idea to call everyone again to reassure them that yes,
the meeting is happening.
By 2 PM, it’s time to start collecting chairs. No one has enough chairs at their house
to properly supply the meeting, at least not the fancy plastic kind, so you go
around to neighbors collecting chair until your compound looks like a Rainbow
Brite moved in. Oh, and don’t
worry about returning the chairs afterwards. Neighbors will send their petites (kids aged 3-12) to collect them.
Once that clock strikes 4 (or for those really au village, when the muezzin starts his
call) it is time to get dressed for the meeting. Remember, the brighter and ‘sparklier’ the better, and, as
leader of the meeting, you should have Bejeweled
infomercial levels of sparkles.
Now it’s just a waiting game.
If you’re lucky, people will start arriving by 4:30, but a better bet is
5. As guests arrive, be sure to
provide drinking water and a shower to splash off in (this only happened once,
but was ridiculous enough I felt I had to include it). By 5:45, you should have enough of a
quorum to start your 4 PM start time meeting. Have your local “more than averagely religious man let out a
string of benedictions. Don’t
forget good health and plenty of offspring.
It’s now time for the meeting to start. Choose a moderator and president for
the meeting, whose roles are basically interchangeable, but who are both
absolutely necessary. Ask for a
volunteer to take minutes. Most
likely no one will be aching to do this, so feel free to pick a victim at
random (some advice: make sure they are literate first!). Now write down the ‘Order of the Day’,
a kind of schedule of the meeting ending with a ‘Miscellaneous’ category. The president will say a few words
worthy of their honorific and announce the meeting open. The first topic can now be discussed,
with the permission of the moderator, of course.
This is the real meat of the meeting, the
back-and-forth. Five minutes in, a
baby should start wiling, prompting all the other infants to join in. But have no fear, tops will come off,
breasts will come out, and all the babies will be quietly nursing in the blink
of an eye. Any particularly strong
personalities, and there’s always at least one, should have taken over by
now. Each will need to talk about
each topic at least twice, so try to account for this in your timekeeping. At about the halfway mark, you should
have anywhere from 50-75% attendance, with stragglers continuing to arrive
every couple minutes. It is the
perfect time for a group of vendors to enter your meeting space, selling candy,
shoes, or cologne. Half your
meeting will most likely want to form a ‘commerce’ sub-group and will signal
this by throwing off their shoes and running over to try on those bright pink
flip-flops that are so popular nowadays.
You can continue in this divided state if you choose, but one of your
previously mentioned strong personalities will probably take offense that he
doesn’t have everyone’s full attention and commence a 10 minute lecture about
the seriousness of the meeting.
Between all of this, you should have been able to at least
touch on most of your topics and be ready to summarize and conclude. If your meeting is outside, a herd of
5-20 sheep will walk through as you try to voice your final thoughts, drowning
you out with their shockingly human-like screams (listen to
this if you don’t
understand what I’m talking about).
The most efficient and cute way to deal with this is to name your
youngest petite head sheepherder and have him chase them away. You can now signal your religious man
again, who should have plenty of unused blessings left in his artillery. Someone should start a round of thanks,
thanking everyone from you tot heir mother to Obama that will spread to the
rest of your attendees faster than the bird flu. If it was an especially good meeting,
this may even culminate in a song and dance in your honor. With that, your meeting should be
over. Attendees will rush over to
buy that last “Titanic: Jack and Rose” perfume before ht others and the
neighboring petites will start to arrive.
Now you can relax and bask in the glory of your successful meeting,
watching the rainbow parade of plastic chairs streaming from your compound.
Sidenote/background: I remember having a session during
Pre-Service Training about meetings in Guinea and thinking it was a waste of
time to devote two hours to the topic, but, after attending my share of
meetings, I can see why. It is one
of those instances where the Guinean culture mixed with French bureaucratic
history makes for a very frustrated American. Guineans are nothing if not verbose and meetings are the
perfect soapbox for just about everyone.
That mixed with the never ending regulations and minute details of the
French system make meetings seem slow and tedious to Americans. This is not to say they are necessarily
bad. Because the meetings aren’t
rushed, everyone gets a chance to talk and rarely gets cut off. Also every detail about the meeting is
recorded so you can look back at a later time. In spite of this, I still have those days when I get so
frustrated I just have to laugh out loud as we pass the fifteenth minute
debating whether ‘Alpha broke his arm’ should come second of third in the Order
of the Day program.
