Corporate Africa? Not so much.

I've been to enough take-your-daughter-to-work-days to realize that business in Africa works differently than in America.  For instance, the girls (and their kids) for the treatment center arrive on Monday.  Yesterday we called in the teachers and found that two of the four teachers (one nursery, one adult literacy) are no longer going to able to work here.  So my supervisor, Barbra, and I drove to a nearby nursery school and asked them if they had any names of people that applied for positions there but that were not hired.  We then drove to the district office and asked the director of education for another person.  We basically just said, give us someone and trusted that they had interviewed them and would give us the best of their candidates.  So today we drove back to the nursery school.  We didn't even tell them we were coming but they had sure enough brought a woman that they thought we should hire.  So we did.  On the spot.  We also went back to the district and they are giving us a person later today.  Just like that.

I can't even imagine that working in the states.  No background check for someone working with children?  No references?  No interviews?  No discussion about salary?  No check for identification?  Just "okay, come in on Monday."

I think there are a couple reasons for this:
1.  This is Africa.  Everything is on the fly, planning is silly because things just happen.  Nobody is concerned about formalities and nobody gets sued for silly reasons.
2.  This is an NGO.  Non-government Organizations seem to have a rep for being relaxed in terms of business.  You may or may not have found that out, but sometime you will, just wait.



Anyhow, last night we went into town (which is about an 8 minute walk from where we are).  We were on a mission to buy chocolate bars.  We finally found some and we are going to teach two of the women from FH staff how to bake chocolate chip cookies!