Plan on Planning

(Ed.Note: The Photos are just to enjoy, and not in support of the rambling text)

Hmm, trying to be better at posting more frequent blog entries isn’t always easy… I know that I’m going to be at a ciber café tomorrow, thus, I’m going to try to write a blog entry now to post tomorrow, but as of this second, don’t really have a topic. Ok, well, the reason we will be down in “the big city” of La Palma tomorrow is to finalize preparation on a solicitude to get some funds to run a short camp/workshop. Katie and I are working with two other volunteers in the local area to put together the proposal, and will also end up running the camp/workshop sometime in December, assuming we get funded.

The “campamento” is called Thinking Outside the Box. We are going to focus on 13 to 16 year olds, taking them out of their respective communities (each volunteer to take 5 kids from their community), and having a 3 day, 2 night “camp” with them. Sounds fun huh?! The focus of the activities during the camp are on analytical, and creative thinking. This is lacking in any current Salvadorean school curriculum.

As part of our preparation for this, we gave a survey to a number of school kids in our communities. The focus of the survey was their future. Questions were things like; how long do you plan to go to school, what do you want to do when you grow up, where do you see yourself in 10 years, and what are your dreams? I think that the thing that struck all of us after we gave the survey was just how difficult these questions were for our kids! They really struggled to come up with any answers. The boys tended to be worse than the girls, and regardless of all of our promptings and help, we still often had to write “does not know”.

With many of them it was just obvious that they had not ever thought about it. Some of this is definitely cultural. Something that we don’t recognize about ourselves as US citizens (hard not to say Americans, but hey, guess what, Americans includes everyone on not one, but two continents!), is that we are trained to spend a lot of time thinking about the future. We do lots of less desirable things because of some future goal (retirement, mowing lawns to get an Xbox 360, ect…), this is part of our culture. We are always planning! We plan our vacations, we plan for college, we plan weddings, kids, and our afternoon. This is not the way the whole rest of the world works, certainly not here in El Salvador. One of the things that most frustrates our volunteers down here is the lack of planning. Here, everything just happens. It goes hand in hand with the whole sense of time thing…people from the US talk about things like “wasting” time, that is simply not possible down here. Without plans, how can time be wasted?

It may sound like I’m saying that planning is good, and therefore the lack of planning here is a weakness… to a point I am… but I’d like to throw this out as an example of a cultural difference that we should question of ourselves… is planning good for us? For years now I have struggled with friends on the concept of “planning” trips. I used to get questions about if I made reservations for all of my “hotels” during my travels, or for various excursions? My answers of “no” frequently scared and confused people. How could you arrive in Sydney Australia, so far from home, and not know where you would stay that first night? That lack of planning scares us. Many people have told me flat out that they just couldn’t do that! I’d just like to throw out that this might be a strong cultural weakness on our part.

As any good battle general knows, plans are really great things…until the actual battle starts, and then you’d better adapt, or die. I can smell a great analogy here with the whole Iraq war concept… In Bush’s mind he had a plan for how things would go, and when things started changing on him, he never really adapted. This confidence and reliance on plans is a cultural fault. The same has always been true during my travels. Some of my (probably most) best experiences during trips have not, and could not have been planned. Things like shearing sheep on a ranch in western Australia, or seeing Jerusalem (we never even planned on entering Israel and spent over 2 weeks there), going to Tikal the first time… tons of examples here of great unplanned things.

Anyway, the point is not that plans are bad, but rather that over-reliance on plans could be a bad thing. Lack of plans is not a great thing either, the folks down here do need to start making and understanding the concepts of planning. But the real strength of a person shows when their plans don’t work… how do they adapt? This is what really makes good generals, coaches, and leaders. Can they think on their feet, do they listen and take advice? Can they make a new plan?

For us, that is the way things seem… you just go from one plan, to the next. The whole idea of contingencies is about always having a plan. What does this mean for us? Well for one thing it always means that we are comparing where we “are”, compared to “The Plan”. This can give us good feedback, we are doing well, or guilt when we aren’t measuring up to our plan. I’d put out there that our culture of planning also follows to a culture of guilt… hmmm, haven’t thought all of this through completely, just going with it for now… But what I’m saying is something like… we are walking down the road, “planning” on going to Don Jorge’s, but Niña Esmerelda invites us in, and the next thing you know we have a coffee cup in our hand and are discussing her family. Now, if you are a typical person from the US, you start to feel guilty because of your plans! You can’t really enjoy the conversation, because you are thinking about how you should leave soon. If you are from a “less planny” society, you get to really appreciate the time with Niña Esmerelda, no guilt, just enjoying life.

I think this might be what I am getting at. Enjoy life! To do this, I think, you need to let go of plans, at least a little bit. This will get rid of your guilt and expectations, and allow you to just live. Try it. This all might, might, be some of the reason that the people down here, regardless of circumstance, seem to be happier than most folks back home.

Ok, well, I have wondered a bit far afield from where I started…or have I? Regardless, this is as far as I am going to take this for now. The most important thing I’d like to get across, is that so called cross cultural differences, are just that differences! There is no better or worse about them. Our instant reaction upon encountering them is to think, “that’s stupid, why do they do it like us”. When instead we should take the opportunity to ask ourselves why we do “X” that way? The answer, if we really look, might surprise us and give us some new insights on our society. Cheers!