Colombia Cartagena: Day 5

It was another very full day of work, pretty much all the way from our breakfast meeting at 7:30 until after 10 pm, when I finally finished a roughed-out draft of the certificate that we'll be presenting to our workshop participants. There's not a lot to tell - work is work after all.

The nature of business work may be similar wherever you go but not all business meetings are created alike. The Colombian-style meeting is almost nothing like its counterpart in Canada. Imagine yourself in a building more than 100 years old, in a large room with ceilings almost as high as the room is wide. Air conditioners are running full blast & a couple of fans push the air even harder. There is no carpeting so every sound echoes.  Most of the meeting participants arrive within an hour of each other but there are exceptions. The day starts with an extended period of greeting each other (hugs, kisses & handshakes at the beginning of each day), selecting a place at or near the meeting table (which is usually too small to accommodate everybody), and hunting down an outlet to plug in the laptop. Coffee arrives in a carafe. There's a lot of visiting and It's hard to tell when the conversation finally morphs into the meeting proper.  

The meeting style is amazing. Everyone talks at once & if you want to add something, interruption is the rule. From time to time participants may appear to be typing with concentration but in the middle of that they will interrupt the meeting conversation to offer their opinion or argue a point. Cell phone conversations compete with the conversation in the room: in the middle of debating a choice of grammar in the project plan, for example, a participant will check an incoming text on her cellphone, distracted only a fraction of a second before continuing to make her point. Phones ring, people respond (even if they are the main speaker/presenter at the time) & it's no problem; the other participants immediately fill the vacuum with conversation. People come & go, getting coffee, going outside for a few minutes, moving to the other end of the room to talk with somebody else. I have no idea how they manage so many auditory channels at once. Imagine the confusion when you add a second language to the mix: Canadians talking with Canadians, Canadians talking with Colombians, Colombians with each other, the translator adding her two-way input, others making corrections or additions to the translator's input.

Really: it's amazing that anything gets done but by the end of the day it seems as much work has been completed than would have been done if we had met Canadian-style, arriving all on time (more or less) & moving through the agenda in a linear style with hands raised to take our turns.