One company I worked for in the past was very strict about discrimination of any kind at work.
We had some people calling blacks slaves’ offspring. We had many people also make fun of people from India and Pakistan. We suffered in silence but good employers always know.
So we were sent to a hotel on a 3 day retreat to learn about team work.
It was always team excercises.
The first challenge in a team you are assigned to was your hands are tied down and you must eat with a long spoon.
One kid jumped from the team I was stuck in and had the solution. Take your spoon with your feet and feed the person next to you. It turned out to be the solution. So we learned to care for each other.
The next challenge was harder. The director who was teaching a bunch of brats to work as a team had done something on discrimination. He put up a chart of the world. We were all given pins to place a different colour in the country we were born in, the country of your parents and the country of your grand parents.
Some 94 pins were outside of Canada. So he taught us about discrimination big time. Imagine the head of IT was born in Zimbabwe and had such a thick English accent no one had ever wondered. It was a humbling moment. This is the same gentleman who insisted on using the training days each year. He always told us “if your CV is good, even if you get laid off, other companies will hire you”.
On the third day my older brother got stabbed and I flew out of that hotel in a flash but not so fast. The IT director met me before I jumped into the car and asked me why I was taking off. I told him that my brother was at Sunnybrook hospital from a stabbing. He was not easy on me. He asked me who had done the stabbing. I told him one of the kids. He then said something that he likely does not remember. “Kids rebel. Never put them in that position. One day you shall be a mother. But go to your brother and keep this in mind that you must never allow your kids to rebel just because you get angry”. My brother was saved and the kid too. So when we had our girls, I remembered that advice. Never corner kids. And to this day I also remember his other advice. Always keep your CV up to date.
Martha Leah Nangalama
Moncton, Canada
I write about real life. I have a Masters in Information Science and a bachelor in Business Administration with Computers