Recruitment Continues

I am still in the process of recruiting participants in the workshops that will be teaching people how to develop community development projects. I am about half-way done. I think that by the end of next week I will have visited over half the houses in Zone F. I've never conducted surveys before. It's quite the repetitive process. It's a bit hard to focus sometimes when I am repeating myself for the 40th time. I start to forget to say some things or say them slightly differently every time.

 

But it's also interesting, because I am able to see common responses of people. At the end, when I am finished explaining what PACE is all about and they are finished telling me who they think would be good participants, I always ask if they have any questions or concerns about the project. Before I ask them that, they are almost always ready to say goodbye, which would seem to indicate that they don't have any questions. But so far almost every person has had at least one question or concern. Some have many... "People cultivate in the morning, so you should hold the workshops in the evening. What is the content of the workshops? What will the participants do when the workshops are finished? What kinds of projects will the create? What if the people we choose don't want to be in the workshops? Can only educated people participate?"

 

I'm always glad when they have concerns and questions, because that means they care about how the workshops turn out and are expecting something. It seems like a lot of what I am doing is raising people's expectations for PACE, but I think that's important. If the community doesn't expect real results from PACE, then who will put pressure on the participants to do a good job?

 

It makes me nervous too. If it fails or doesn't meet their expectations, they may lose a lot of faith in FORGE, me, the participants, and PACE. And they'll all be disappointed. But a lot of people have put a lot of thought into PACE, and dozens of heads are better than one, so it's hard to imagine that it would completely flop. It's also great to hear people's concerns and questions, because most of them have been repeated several times, and there are rarely new ones, which makes me think that we have all the bases covered.

 

Yesterday, I taped three of the interviews. I hope to videotape all the parts of the project so that people who contributed to PACE can see exactly what the project looked like. You'll have to wait to see the final project, but these interviews generally take place in the shade of people's mud brick huts on little stools, logs, buckets, and chairs. I always get the nicest chair, which feels weird every time but I always accept gratefully. Children usually congregate and are soon shooed away by the adults. Pigs and goats wander around in the shade. I sometimes wonder on a scale of 1 to 10 exactly how out of place I look. I'm guessing maybe an 8.