People versus task

As we are now in a new country, the Dominican Republic, we needed to begin our first full day with cultural competence training. We had a lot of preparation prior to our trip, but a refresher course was a helper. One thing that was immediately helpful was the notion of “people versus task.” In the United States, we are very focused on tasks as our main objective throughout the day, whereas latino cultures are more focused on the people. This was immediately evident on our scavenger hunt that we were sent out on to get a feel for the lay of the land and throw us into the culture and language. I volunteered for the first task, which was to ask how much a shoe shine costs. I had one other student coach me on how to say this in Spanish, which I practiced over and over prior to encountering a person. I then repeated my practiced saying. He first gave me a blank stare, and then went into his life story without answering my question at all. After over 5 minutes of him informing me that he is 80 something, has been shining shoes for over 70 years, has 4 grown children, many grand kids, enjoys music, and many other personal facts, all while my other classmates who understand Spanish stood laughing and watching me look very confused and clearly not understanding where I went wrong in asking my question. Not learning our lesson, my other classmate attempted another item on our scavenger list, she asked a street vendor what flavors of skimice (like mr. freezies) were available. The vendor looked confused and replied “bien” (good). He did not understand why we were not asking how he or his family was doing. Finally we all realized, we were already making cultural mistakes of concentrating on the task and not the people. We then finished our scavenger hunt always first saying hello and asking the vendors how they were doing, shared fun facts, and then finally got to the task question. This strategy delivered better results, but we continue to need prompts from each other to put people over task.