Focusing on Women

Today I had a chance to sit in the back of the classroom and whisper during my workshops. For the past few days I have been training the participants how to run their own focus groups, which are a method of collecting in-depth, qualitative information about the community's problems. Over the course of four days, the participants create a list of all the major problems in the community, vote for the most important ones, and discuss the top few. We talk about the causes, effects, and potential solutions to the problems.

 

I had demonstrated how to facilitate discussion last class, and today I gave them a chance to get some practice facilitating conversation with each other before they start running their own focus groups in a couple days. I sat, squeezed into a seventh grade desk, behind the semi-circle of women who were discussing the top issues they had identified in the community - poor harvest, transportation, and school fees. My translator was inches from me and I hunched over so that I could hear him well without him having to speak too loudly. He was translating as the conversation evolved, and I noticed that if he spoke too loudly it made the women stop talking and wait for him to finish for me, which always breaks people's train of thought and makes for less animated and interesting conversation.

 

The women were really worked up at various points. My translator listened and summarized the points for me, so there were many points when I could just listen to the women speaking and try to figure out what they were saying from the few words I could understand and just watching them. Sometimes, one of them would start to speak loudly, and enunciate in a staccato fashion, as though making a formal speech. Her eyes would widen, and whatever gestures she made with her hands usually involved a finger pointing somewhere. And when she finished, all the other women would nod and give verbal signs of affirmation that I couldn't understand past knowing that they were in agreement.

I was quite proud as I sat there, thinking about the fact that my presence was so unnecessary at that moment. They were discussing problems that they really cared about, problems that they were all familiar with and had lived with for years and years. I had been worried before that they would think this exercise was silly because everything they were discussing was so obvious to them, and obvious to everyone. But they seemed to find it quite useful. One of them said afterwards that the exercise made the community problems fresh and clear in their minds.

 

I considered what things I would think of if I was doing a similar activity about my community in Somerville, MA where I had lived before coming here. I wondered if there would be such a clear consensus on the community problems. Probably not - mostly because the community is much more diverse. Here, in Zone F, most people are in very similar boats. They come from Congo, a few from Angola. Most were not farmers when they arrived, but people dropped them off somewhere in the camp and told them they'd better figure out how to farm pretty quick if they didn't want to starve. Imagine being a secretary, a banker, a businessperson, or a politician and being handed a hoe and some seeds and being told to make some food out of infertile land that you had no idea what to do with or your family would starve. Most have learned to farm now, but still have a lot to learn. Many don't know how to use fertilizer even when they do get it. They don't know when to plant what crops. They don't know how to best set up fields. They have to ask their neighbors and trust that they know what they are talking about. Even those who were farmers before worked in different places with different soil. I found all this fascinating.

 

I also found some of the ways in which they described what it was like to live with these problems eye-opening. One woman said, "Someone who is uneducated is a sufferer. She will face many calamities all the time because education leads to a higher standard of living." Another said that the effect of having a poor harvest way to "make you like someone who is in prison because you won't have freedom of movement. You will not be able to go anywhere because you will not have money from your produce. You will be stuck behind bars of poverty."

 

I got goose bumps listening to them. The problems they were talking about all came back to lack of farming inputs and lack of transportation, indicating that these may very well be the projects we end up selecting. And they seem so solvable right now. It'll take work, money, thought, and organization. But we've got all of that at our disposal. Of course, we still need to talk to others in the community, but the puzzle is quickly taking shape. I wonder if they already knew what the puzzle would look like. In any case, the process of putting it together certainly makes the picture clearer for us all, regardless of whether we had seen it before or not.