The concept of money is not the same as to people in Sierra Leone. You can ask most people what their average income is in any interval yet none will be able to give you a number. The concept of living on a paycheck and having this much to spend this week or next week does not apply to Salone. This makes it really difficult to judge a personal income and correlate it. We learned there were better ways to do this. One of the ways we learned was a good judge of wealth was how many meals you eat, and what you are eating. Though people don’t how much they make, they can tell you many meals they eat in a day, what they eat and how much it cost them. Which allows us to correlate their wealth and meals to their behaviors.
The second big lesson I learned was that behaviors were really based on tribes, and what their families had taught them. Obviously, we knew the second part, but we didn’t think that behaviors were based on actual tribes. We were naive to think that behaviors were based only on family members and their surroundings. We should have in the beginning factored in tribes to account for this and allows us to generalize regions based on which tribe lives there.
Another lesson that we learned was that people know which behaviors are generally risky and are actively trying to prevent it, but their livelihoods prevent them from really doing it. Like a farmer can’t not go into the bush; he would starve. A hunter can’t not hunt bush animals; he would starve. They generally know whats semi-bad, they just can’t do anything about it because of the situation they live in. Coming up with solutions to how to lower risk, but still, have people conduct their daily lives.
Professional Development
This summer I got much better at working on teams. I learned how to assign tasks and split the work. I have not really worked on a project in life where people actually could pull their weight, so being able to learn how to work on a functional team will allow me to know what to do when I enter the real world. I also learned when it comes to teams that sometimes you have to work with people you don’t like and learning how to deal with them can be tough.
Another thing I learned that will help me in a professional sense is how to work with a really different view and how to ask the right questions to those people. I find that half the battle is finding the right question to ask people who disagree with your view. If you can ask the right question then you have a better shot of being able to convince someone to be on your side.
Working in Africa has developed my ability to get stuff done with little resources. For example, working with little wifi connection makes you have to think outside of the box to get a project done that in the States would be easy with wifi, but not without. Having your brain pressed like this to complete complex tasks in resource-limited environments allows you to be able to know what to do when you don’t have everything you are using, as well as when things go wrong.
Help you Grow Personally
Personally going to Sierra Leone has helped me see the world a different way. Understanding that the world does not revolve around business, school, and technology was refreshing. I feel like now that I am back, for better or worse, I don’t really value my professional life as much as a now value my friends and family. Your on this earth for so long, but just cause your rich doesn’t mean you had a great and meaningful mind.
Another thing that I realized is that just cause you can’t see the end goal doesn’t mean there is no value. I feel like a lot of the decisions I make, are etched on how much value this will get me towards a goal. Since going I sort of have taken a new philosophy of let’s just work and see what we get, cause we never will be able to know what we will get for sure.
The final thing that I think has helped me is changing my perspective of going up to people. For the entire time, I went from house to house meeting random people and asking them very personal questions. I think knowing that I can do this and that people don’t really hate you, though they might show some resentment has helped me meet new people.
One thought on “Fall Week 1”
Hi Nate,
You highlight some great lessons learned in your blog post this week – I especially like your first point which could be broadened from the example of personal income to the importance of appropriate and applicable variables for measurement in cross-cultural research. I’d suggest using more specific examples wherever possible – instead of the general idea of asking the right questions to people with different viewpoints, connect your insight to a specific experience that impressed that lesson upon you. Overall, good job!
-Lauren
Hi Nate,
You highlight some great lessons learned in your blog post this week – I especially like your first point which could be broadened from the example of personal income to the importance of appropriate and applicable variables for measurement in cross-cultural research. I’d suggest using more specific examples wherever possible – instead of the general idea of asking the right questions to people with different viewpoints, connect your insight to a specific experience that impressed that lesson upon you. Overall, good job!
-Lauren