When visiting Tanzania, as a woman you may be told never to wear trousers, and as a man you may feel out of place when wearing shorts.  During your visit you may notice that queues hardly exist and time seems to have lost all meaning. All of these cultural differences can become very infuriating to a foreigner who is visiting Tanzania for holiday, let alone foreigners who are living and working in Tanzania. This is also true for Tanzanians; they often feel the same way when interacting with foreigners.

On Friday, March 6th, in an effort to mitigate some potential conflicts in our workspace, Cedar Tanzania took time from their busy schedules to participate in an internal cross-cultural training. The training, facilitated by Paulina and myself, Dylan, involved all the Cedar Tanzania workers in Mwanza. It covered a range of generalities and specifics about culture, cultural differences, cultural clash, and ways to prevent this type of conflict.

We started the day off with just a short discussion to remind ourselves what culture is and where it comes from.  From this it was clear that culture refers to just about everything in our lives, it is abstract, and engrained within us so deeply we can hardly ever notice it.  To exemplify this point, we watched some videos of different cultural dances from within and outside of Tanzania. Dances that seem normal to one but may be strange to another, because they are abstract. Corporate culture was also discussed in this introduction, meaning the culture which is created within an office or cooperation.  The goals and values of the cooperation need to be incorporated into the work and office space. 

From here, we started to look at the iceberg model of culture.  Through this model, it is easy to see the cause of culture clash showing that the D.I.(V).E. model could be used to prevent conflict between cultures. Describe, Interpret, Verify, and Evaluate are the steps which, if taken when interacting with a foreign culture can reduce the likelihood of conflict.  While these are good steps to take to prevent cross-cultural issues in general, they do not prevent all conflicts. Therefore, we began to discuss the components of culture and the specific issues which we have dealt with in Tanzania or at Cedar Tanzania.

Finally we did an activity to get an understanding of the cultural differences between each of us.  This activity allowed members of the team to express and explain their views on some cultural questions. Hopefully, this allowed the team to get a better understanding of how to best work along-side others in the office.

Of course we know a few hours is not enough time to learn all of the nuances of differing cultures, but we do believe this training will start conversations that will continue to unfold and improve operations at Cedar Tanzania. Overall, the hope was that this training will help all of Cedar Tanzania’s workers to be more prepared to work and interact with people from different cultures. 

By Dylan Parkin

Peace Corp Volunteer/Teacher

Cedar Tanzania