I was asked to teach on personality and teams for a Leadership Training Seminar for TAFES. The easiest thing for me to pull together in the 2 days before the seminar was some stuff on DISC, but I had to work out how to make it resonate for Tanzanians. Personality […]
In language class we have been concentrating on Tanzanian proverbs and sayings as there are many in common usage. We have noticed that many of them pertain to the issue of hierarchy. Lots of them are warnings to people who are nearer to the top, but they are not addressed […]
I’ve been trying to get my head around why Tanzanians might view some hierarchy as a good thing. Australians are deeply suspicious of hierarchy, often viewing it as inherently flawed, a system that inevitably leads to abuse of those at the bottom. Tanzanians do not share our pessimism about hierarchy, […]
A TAFES Associate who is also a psychologist posted on her Facebook profile about why a man might beat (but not kill) his wife. She wasn’t trying to give justification for it, but to unpack what his assumptions or mental situation might be. The reasons listed were: he might do […]
We have been in Tanzania 5 years. Which, since we said we’d come for about 10 puts us at the halfway mark. Yikes! Cos it feels like we haven’t really done anything yet! This is exactly what we expected of course. CMS talks to its workers about their 3 year […]
A friend of mine says that even though she’s been married for 35 years, she’s been married to maybe 5 or 6 different men. What she means is that the man she married at their wedding is not the man she’s married to today: he has changed, and marriage is […]
If I had New Years resolutions, my top one every year would be ‘keep learning.’ The world is big and fascinating and complex, with so much to be explored. Here are three things about my cross-cultural life that I’ve learned this year. In the next post I’ll share some things […]
Meet Jesus at uni 