Cycling to Work and Back

I love to cycle. One of the first indicators that I am in a bad mood is when I get annoyed while riding a bicycle. Every day I ride thirty minutes to Zone F during the hottest part of the day. The sun feels just a couple miles above me and just rolling up my pants to get on my bike makes me start to sweat. But I usually enjoy the ride anyway. Today I didn't.

 

My tire was flat when I got on my bike to leave, so I had to pump it up. I took off and immediately noticed the noise of the tire rubbing against the metal fender, which I had to stop several times to bend into place. It continued to croak anyway. A drop of sweat dropped onto my glasses and evaporated right in my line of vision. A fly followed me for at least a mile, landing on my ear every few seconds, which I find amazing - in an incredibly annoying way, of course. A squeak emanated from a part of my bicycle I couldn't identify. Each time someone greeted me I had to force myself to respond.

 

When my attention wasn't clung onto these annoyances, I could only think about the few ways in which PACE isn't going well. There have been problems with the surveys that will have to be fixed before we can calculate any results. Fixing them will take one or two extra days, pushing us a bit behind. We're on a tight schedule already. This could happen with other things, and it's possible I might have to rush some parts of the curriculum to finish before I leave. I can't extend my stay for various reasons. These thoughts repeated in my head.

 

I was in a bad mood. This is what happens when I get in a bad mood. I focus on the things that aren't going perfectly. There aren't many, but nothing ever goes perfectly, so there's always something for me to blow way out of proportion. The mountain of information and skills the participants still have to learn seemed... well, like a mountain. And not one of those little mountains that look like big hills - we're talking the big mountains that you can't even see the tops of.

 

By the time I arrived, I had convinced myself that this pilot of PACE was bound to fail. I waited at the community center for my translator. The first person to arrive was Justin, one of the PACE participants. It's hard to stay in a really bad mood when he's around because he's always singing and smiling. There's something about his voice too. His words bounce as he pronounces them. He got my mind off the specific ways in which PACE was doomed, but I still managed to be kind of grumpy even after a couple minutes of talking to him. My moods are stubborn and hard to push around - at least the bad ones.

 

Then Justin jumped into how great the first day of their focus groups had gone. All the PACE participants started their own focus groups yesterday without me there. There were eight groups total. I had been in Solwezi as I usually am on Mondays and wasn't able to make it for the first. I was excited to hear how it had gone.

 

Justin said the focus group participants had been impressed. They already felt that their ideas were really being considered and valued - that just maybe something was actually going to come of all this surveying and focus group stuff that PACE has been doing for the past three and a half weeks. That maybe PACE is different from other projects. That it just might deliver something valuable to the community. That succeeded in putting me in a better mood.

 

Almost an hour later, I was watching Justin and two other PACE participants run their focus group. I was so impressed. They were doing everything they were supposed to and more. They were so much more animated than they had been when they practiced facilitating a focus group in the classroom the week before. As they gave directions they were pointing and waving their hands around and speaking with confidence. Then, when it was time to listen, they sat down, maintained eye contact, nodded, and made repeated what the person had said before writing it down to make sure they had heard correctly - stuff I hadn't even taught them.

 

I was reminded once again how people tend to rise to the occasion. This was no exception. They were getting valuable information about the problems in the community, which was the whole point. They were taking what I had taught them and adding adding their own ideas and style to it. I could have been upset that they weren't doing exactly what I had taught them, but as my translator told me what they were saying, I realized that they understood the point of the focus groups, and that any changes they were making were intentional improvements. I couldn't have been much prouder as I sat in the back of the classroom watching them facilitate their focus group.

 

Over the course of the afternoon I wandered through each of the eight rooms where the focus groups were being run. Each one had a different feel to it - a combination of the style of the PACE facilitators and that of the participants. The most boisterous was the group of young women being facilitated by PACE women; there was no doubt they were sharing they opinions. The most formal and quiet was the group of older men being led by the PACE men. All different, but all discussing community problems.

 

On my way back home, the noises on my bike fit together to make a funky song that I managed to figure out a way to whistle to. I greeted every person I passed, even if they were too far away to hear me.