08.08.09
Dealing with the Unexpected
How often do surprises or the unexpected find you every day?? Once? Twice? Not at all? For me in Chulucanas, Peru, the unexpected finds me multiple times a day: when I am at work and a half a dozen people show up at the Heath Office to get more medicine or help with a treatment or when I am out in Chulucanas running errands and stop to talk to the friends I see for a while. While this doesn’t seem very different than interruptions in the States, the main difference is how important personal interactions are to Peruvians. This mentality makes it difficult to ignore these surprise interruptions because they view interpersonal relationships as more important than productivity. As I ask people who come to the Health Office of the Diocese of Chulucanas what they need, I am interrupted from the work I planned to do that day to deal with problems and help people.
When I began working at the Health Office, I always planned what I needed to get done for the day but I noticed that these things usually didn´t get done. I thought this was terribly annoying, but after watching the people I work with deal with these surprises, I learned that it is more important how I deal with the person who interrupts me than if I am successful at completing the tasks I planned to do, something we forget about in the States. In the States, finishing our tasks and jobs are the most important part of our jobs. This has made me change my mentality on what successful and productive mean.
Before I came to Peru, I worked in a biology lab, and to be successful in my experiments and jobs in the lab, I had to plan out my days a few days and sometimes weeks in advance. This meant that every day I went to work, I knew exactly what I was going to do that day, and interruptions, which were few, where dealt with after I finished what I have planned. Taking this mentality to Peru meant that I was never being productive because I measured productivity on how much I completed the things I needed to do. This was tough because the rules I played by were suddenly changed. No longer was a successful day a productive one, but a successful day is being able to catch up with a friend or my host family or being able to help someone that comes into the Health Office even though it takes all morning or afternoon.
Adapting to this change was tough because it goes against everything I know but was key to learning how to live in Peru. While I don’t think I have mastered this yet, I have come to accept that the only way to be successful is to redefine it not in the tasks completed but how many people and personal interactions I have encountered.
Daniel Irwin
Chulucanas Peru 2009