Meetings in Senegal are comical. I recently spent a week in Tambacounda at a USAID training where I found myself continually amused at how it was being conducted. Here is what happens at the start of every meeting I have attended in the past year:
-Rules are established. The guidelines of meeting etiquette have not been fully adopted by the Senegalese, so they must be set down a new by each group. This often includes: don’t let your phone ring, be on time, respect one another. These may also have been the rules posted in my middle school cafeteria.
-Penalties are set. If you break a rule, there will be consequences, and they will usually constitute public humiliation. You’re the regional director of water and sanitation? Doesn’t matter, you were late and now you’ve got to dance. Professionalism is not defined the same way in Senegal.
-Reports will be made. Every day a participant is chosen as “the reporter.” At the start of each morning, the reporter from the previous day must present what happened – a reading of the minutes. This reading though, invariably goes into excessive detail of events that happened barely 18 hours prior and for the same group of people who lived through them the first time.
-Fancy dress will be worn. Senegalese professional attire falls into two categories – western and traditional. Both are quite fancy and would make me feel underdressed on a good day. PCV professional attire also falls into two categories – clean and dirty (or: what I wore yesterday and what I didn’t).
So there you have it. Meetings Senegalese style: well dressed and moving at a snail’s pace but always leaving time for a “pause café” and a post-lunch nap. This is where your tax dollars are going.
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