This post is an excerpt from the diary of a global traveler.
Here’s a story about how I jumped to a wrong conclusion as a result of a misunderstanding about culture. While at Rotary one of my tasks in addition to the World Congress was to organize the annual training for 2000 district governors. This weeklong program brought together the elected governors from all the Rotary districts around the world along with their spouses for a combination of training and appreciation event for the voluntary service they were about to perform over the next year. Rotary District Governors often spend around 30 hours of unpaid work promoting Rotary each week for their year in that role.
This event was held in one of the largest hotels in the United States in order to accommodate everyone under one roof. I remember sitting at dinner on the first night when a hotel employee approached me and said that they were having difficulty satisfying a senior Japanese couple with a room. The couple had registered, gone alone to their room and returned within minutes saying in their very limited English that the room was not satisfactory. They did this by handing the key back to the clerk and shaking their heads in a sign of “no”. I knew that all the rooms blocked for district governors were identical, so there was no point in trying to satisfy the couple by changing the room. Then it dawned on me that Japanese people frequently prefer rooms with two beds rather than one king bed and I thought that might be the problem, even though they didn’t have the words to express it. But the hotel clerk informed me that per our advance instructions they were to be given a two-bedded room and they were given such a room. I was stumped and so I excused myself from the dinner table and went to meet them and asked if they would allow me to accompany them to the room so that I could see for myself what the problem was.
The moment they opened the door, I knew exactly what was wrong. The room was already occupied! The hotel had mistakenly assigned two couples to the same room and the other people were already there. The new couple lacked the language to explain this. The couple was given a room all for themselves as intended and all was well.
The problems we face in multilingual and multicultural environments is sometimes quite different from what we think it might be. Because I knew something about the sleeping habits of many Japanese, I jumped to a conclusion about why they were objecting to the room they were assigned. In reality, culure played no role here at all other thean the difficulty the Japanese couple had trying to convey the nature of the problem with their room. They were very happy when they were escorted to their own private room as intended all along.
Herb