Marie’s back. I should’ve mentioned that before, but I was on a roll of cultural diatribes. She got back on Saturday night and we’ve had a bit of time to catch up. It was her first time managing a team and she loved it. Despite the ‘Spider Solataire’ culture of Bhutan, she managed to keep them working seven days a week for the full month, with only a couple of recovery days. The only time she had trouble was in Mirek – Sakten, the villages she’d been most looking forward to visiting. It’s almost impossible for most of us to get a road permit to reach these places, but she had government support which opens many doors.
The problem was a culture clash with the extension agent on work ethics. In Marie’s eyes, he pushed the image of lazy beyond the acceptable bounds. His attitude is not really surprising considering he probably thought he’d be getting an easy government job in a major town rather than 2 days walk from the nearest road. When Marie arrived in the evening, she wanted to meet to plan the next couple of days. The extension agent (a general purpose consultant and govt. go between for farmers) was playing darts and didn’t think it important enough to quit for.
The next day, although Marie had asked to meet the farmers on their own farms – so she could have a look at the setup herself – he arranged for them all to meet in the village, 2 hours later than she’d been planning. On the following day, she asked him to take her to the dairy processing unit at 7am so she could see the making of cheese / butter, but he turned up at 9am, after it had all finished. Finally, he decided to walk them back to the road, probably to get a daily service allowance, and tried to extend their trip by a day for the extra money he’d get.
The real shock for Marie was the reaction of her team – not to the extension agent, but to Marie herself. Anger is not appropriate, so when Marie stopped being friendly to him, her team stopped talking to Marie. They’d been coaching her to give some money – a tip, I guess – to each extension agent who merely did their job, and she’d complied until this time. As she wouldn’t give him any money, her team did, complaining that they’d had to give from their own pockets. By that stage, Marie cared little and the team showed typical Bhutanese friendliness, forgiving her quickly.