Meeting observations

written Monday, 25 June 2007

 

 

I was at another meeting yesterday of the village health volunteers, who have decided to create a formal association - mainly in hopes of being able to get money from NGOs.   Anyway, a couple of funny things I noticed:

 

No matter how many times a group has met and in spite of everyone knowing everyone else, meetings must always start with a ten minute discussion of what language to conduct the meeting in.

 

Although all the meeting attendees were local villagers (except for me) with probably only middle-school level educations, if even that, they really like giving long, formal speeches - i.e. thanks to everyone for coming, I'm so glad to be here, I think this is a really important meeting, here is my position on the issues....  I felt like I was back at the UN meetings I used to go to when I was interning with the State Department.