Diplomacy

Before I got to the Peace Corps I prided myself on being a good communicator and felt that being direct and honest were always the most effective ways to communicate. I can recall tons of situations in which I had a conflict so I confronted the situation head on and dealt with it in an open and honest way and the result was always positive. However, after about 3 months in site I have realized that being diplomatic may be a better approach than being direct. Hondurans tend to be far less direct than Americans are, so instead of trying to change the way Hondurans communicate I need to adapt to their way of doing things, I am the foreigner after all. However, this means that I will have to hold my tongue and swallow my pride from time to time (which might be hard to do, but I am willing to give it a try). My dad quotes his boss, saying “do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?” There have been many times since I have been here when I just wanted to tell somebody off and make them understand how ludicrous their reasoning was or how rude their actions were or call them out when I knew they were lying to my face. Yet, in Honduras this is not an effective way of dealing with my problems, so even though I really want to be right I have to get over it and put my goals as a Peace Corps volunteer above my desire to prove my point. For example, one of the organizations I work with is funded by a local philanthropy group and whenever we meet with them their main focus seems to be on signs and logos. They always ask why we put their logo on the ride side of the paper and not the left and why our logo is bigger than their logo and why we don’t make a sign and put it at the entrance of town, and why their logo is not on our shirt, etc. It infuriates me because it makes me feel that all they care about is letting everybody know about all the good things they do and don’t actually care about the content of what we are doing. So, I could try to tell them to get over their obsessions with getting credit for getting credit for work they don’t even do and start focusing on the important stuff. However, I don’t think that being told off by a 23 year old female would help out working relationship…I need to realize that these men hold power in this community and in order for me to be an effective Peace Corps volunteer here over the next two years I need to be on their good side. So, I should just suck it up and say “your right, letting people know who we are and what we do is really important, we’ll make sure your logo is more visible from now on” (Wow, I’m getting good at this already, I even believe that!)
Luckily Nineth, my counterpart, is very open and I feel like I can be totally honest with her, so it gives me a little break from feeling like I have to be diplomatic all the time. She is also a good mentor, constantly telling me that I have to understand how things work here, that there are protocol and hierarchies that I am not allowed to break (although being a foreigner gives me a little leeway, I can always blame it on my lack of understanding of the language and the culture). So one of my new goals is to finish my Peace Corps service knowing that I can be direct or diplomatic, depending on what the situation calls for.