I second that motion...

One thing I was totally unprepared to find as took my vaccinations and bought my mosquito net and made all of he preparations for the potential hazards of working on a refugee camp was the tedium and officiousness of the many administrative meetings we are required to attend working with this NGO. It must be an unfortunate blend of a post-colonial obsession with parliamentary procedure and relaxed African sense of time and penchant for verbose oration that turns what could have been a 15 minute discussion into a 2 hour meeting.

Every meeting begins with a prayer. Fair enough. We all bow our heads and desperately pray that the meeting is productive. I add a silent prayer for brevity. After that is an official welcome. Then the agenda is read. Someone has to agree to the agenda and propose that we accept it. Then someone seconds this. Then we can move on to the… reading the previous meeting’s minutes. After that we ask of there are any corrections or additions to the minutes, talk about this for a while and entertain more motions to accept the minutes to the record. Then we have our meeting. Often this is about 1 hour after the time the meeting was called for because the meetings invariably start about a half an hour late. It’s all so officious that you’d think we were deciding on a complex trade deal between two competitor nations instead of talking about cleaning drains and making copies of school exams. Despite the tedium things can sometimes get quite heated, and when that happens people prop their heads up from their naps and take notice. It’s pretty impressive though, tensions are often diffused with a joke and laughter comes easy to everyone regardless of disagreements.

In spite of the level of misery brought on by these meetings, committees are constantly being formed necessitating even more meetings. Those of us who work in the school have the opportunity to be on the discipline committee, the academic affairs committee, the program planning committee, the phonics curriculum committee, or the tutoring committee. I suppose this is partly attributable to a constant influx of over-eager volunteers who are forever attempting new programs and initiatives that require meetings and budgets and committees - which all quickly leads to an unwieldy bureaucracy. Well, it would be wieldy, but ironically for such serious-seeming organization people often fail to show up to meetings, or come up to 30 minutes late. This was frustrating at first, but it’s actually become quite liberating because I no longer rush off to meetings, which I suppose makes me part of the problem, but when in Rome…

In truth, CBW employees are probably among the most prompt Liberians because they are forced to work with us time-sensitive white people. If a meeting is important, they tell us they’ll be there by 3 PM “American time” - which means they will make every effort to be there before 3:15. In contrast, I ran a literacy workshop for some of the older women on camp which was scheduled for 4 PM to 5 PM, and the first woman showed up at 4:45. So, time is a pretty flexible concept here. To that end, even though would could be a 15 minute meeting might take 2 hours, I know these next 3 months feel like weeks!