When being an incompetent facilitator is a good thing (maybe)

There were no fans. My head was pounding. My eye was tearing. Rapid-fire Kiswahili echoed in the room.

I was in a meeting today where I was supposed to be the facilitator. I was a bit sick and I felt it would be better if the flow of the meeting wasn’t interrupted as much with the translation of every sentence. So I asked the stakeholders to facilitate the meeting. Result: much boredom and more energy to dwell on my now raging headache.

Honestly, though, I’m glad. This network we’re trying to form has to come from their initiative. I’m just the facilitator. My job is to sit there and just jump in when needed. At least we got a lot discussed.

Unfortunately, I’m not really sure when I’m needed because of the language barrier. It’s so hard to facilitate a meeting in a different meeting culture in a completely different language.