Today was the second wake in a month I’ve been to with colleagues from work. The first one was the wake of a janitor/gardener from our office who died about a month ago. I was astonished to see that 80 people from our office - everyone - came out. That would never happen in a Western work-place, even with a very special janitor. Then again, it happened during work-time. I’d just got into the office that morning when someone informed me of his death. And then they asked me if I would go to the wake? My reaction was: “What, now?”
Everyone came to pay last respects to him. He was a very likeable person. I didn’t know him well but we exchanged many smiles and I gave him a lift on my motor-cycle once.
Today was the other wake. It was actually for a family member of a young colleague. I’ve never met the deceased person but I know this colleague fairly well. Again, pretty much the whole office emptied out and we paid the visit together.
In Germany, funerals are often a small crowd, no larger than maybe one or two dozen people. Here we are talking of at least one hundred at a wake! Would it flatter or relieve you to know if a hundred people came to pay last respects to you?
Wakes here in Lombok are not a morose and solemn thing. While everyone expresses condolences to the family, there is some noticeable laughing and chatter going on.
And through the chatter, I kept wondering about Taylorism and labor productivity, good governance and cultural differences. This time, I was really intrigued. Is this right, I kept wondering? To my Western mind there is an obvious conflict of interest: we are a government office and expected to be at work. And yet this is what is customary here and - in Lombok at least - most government offices would do. The employees leave work for an hour to go to a wake. They see it as a duty to the deceased and the mourning family. And in the end I guess social customs and duties make a place such as this tick.
Will this custom ever change, I wondered? Imagine you wanted to go to your local citizen center and it was empty due to a staff’s decease? Shouldn’t wakes be attended outside work-time maybe, one might delicately ask? But then, as we know, wakes and funerals are hardly attended by the same numbers in the West at all. Our societal fabric has been broken down and changed since industrialization, and do we have a recipe for other nations to revamp their social fabric in a more harmonic way?
So while I was still thinking about the said conflicts of interest and said good governance aspects, how this could relate to a different culture than my own, I realized the little hypocrisy in my position. While we in the West would say it is inappropriate to stop work to go to a wake or funeral, we will stop work for much more trivial things:
If you are a tax payer in a football-loving nation, beware of 2010. Having worked a summer-job after high-school in the courier service of the Foreign Ministry - this was the 2002 World Cup - I can tell you from personal experience that all work there grinds to a halt when games are on. I had almost no files to send and carry around at all during the 90 minutes of German football matches. Mail-traffic within the ministry dwindled to a 5%, and every file that did go round was marked in red letters with “urgent”. Which tells you that really only urgent stuff got done, and all the other stuff could wait.
A similar thing was noted by economists in England about worker absenteeism during England matches in the World Cup. They calculated that UK businesses lost up to £100m a day as thousands of Englishmen skived work to follow the England matches. Which, to an economist at least, makes it a blessing in disguise if your country comes home early from the World Cup.
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