Derdians - Engineers point of view

Engineers experience of the activity

Initially, we were split up into groups, my team where informed that we were a group of engineers who where needed to build a bridge for a group of people known as the “Derdians”. This was a group of people who currently had to take a two day journey to reach the local markets, but after the successful construction of the bridge this journey would be cut down to only five hours. The task was that we had to teach the Derdians to build the bridge themselves, we thought this was going to be a relatively easy task until two of my fellow team mates went to visit Derdia. They said this was a very intense situation as upon their arrival they were surrounded by a group of eight people all trying to kiss them on the shoulder and all becoming furious when the gesture was not being returned. The Derdian people began shouting each time Kate and Yasmine tried to speak and shushing them, due to a lack of physical contact, the Derdian people found this very disrespectful. After quite some time Kate realised that the physical contact was needed and the engineers began to get some of the answers they needed or so they thought.

Kate and Yasmine then returned to our team and explained their ordeal, the main problem they described was when they asked a question the response was always yes sometimes just “yes” and at other times the answer was “yes” (with excessive head nodding) which meant no. It was very difficult to distinguish which was yes and which was no. However we were able to get some of the answers we needed, including whether or not we were allowed to use any form of supports underneath the bridge.

We then all returned to Derdia as a group, slightly cautious as we had been informed of the ways of the Derdian people, as expected they greeted us with a kiss on the shoulder. This took quite some time to get around everybody, we then got to work on explaining the process of building the bridge, this process involved a lot of shouting and was very time consuming. A problem arose which none of us had been introduced to was the fact that we asked Christian to draw and gave him a pencil, this is where most of the shouting began as boys are not allowed to touch pencils in their culture, 20 minutes later we had successfully built a bridge a lot less complex then we had originally planned but all in all it met the brief we had, successfully shorting the route for the Derdians.

To begin with we were confused as to why we had been given this activity to complete, but once it was completed we realised that some of the situations we had encountered in this challenge could come up in Tanzania due to the huge cultural differences. As a group we all realised that we had actually taken things from this experience some of these being that you have to constantly be adapting to your environment and be respectful to other people’s cultures. Overall this was an extremely well thought out activity and has made me understand that we need to be constantly adapting to new environments.

Robyn