Tuesday was Documentation Day...

Tuesday was Documentation Day. The main component that drives my project is documentation. All the Community Mobilizers (CMs) were there (the ones who could make it) to dive into improving the way they document their work. Throughout planning, implementing, and observing the workshop, I learned more than I could have imagined.

I spent some time structuring the workshop with the trainer that we contracted for the workshop. We brainstormed, we came up with activity ideas, and we made room for all priorities to be met. Doing that planning was seriously inspirational. Thorough exhausting of ideas excites me, it motivates me to work hard on expanding those ideas and getting others on board. Others I know can agree that working with others in a constructive manner is uplifting. It also gave me my first experience as a teacher making lesson plans. I never doubted you Mom and Dad, but this furthered my respect for how much work planning and preparing for education is! In the next couple weeks I compiled numerous documents and went through many hurdles to get them perfected and produced. In the end, the day came around and I was still essentially blind to what I would be doing.

The day’s morning session was not run by me. The consultant trainer, Eunice, works heavily with guilt and negativity. She told everybody that they didn’t know stuff, that they were doing things wrong, etc, etc. It was hard for me to listen to and accept. She did not work constructively. The psychology of adult education is unique and teaching adults requires a much different approach. Adults are more aware and are less susceptible to chastising. I frequently wanted to intervene, get her more on track, and stop her from ruining the afternoon session.

The afternoon session, run by me, started again with Eunice telling everyone they were wrong wrong wrong! I intervened and asked if we could use the current activity to segway into my session. A good decision, but a rough start. The afternoon session follows lunch. I had to start by handing out papers and explaining them. Together, food and lecture very effectively put everyone to sleep. A shout for an energizer (I’ll explain the use of energizers in my next post) led to a fantastic activity with some singing and dancing that woke up everybody. That also gave me time to reflect, to understand the work ahead of me, to prioritize, and to direct myself.

My session was on the format of reporting the CMs produce and the system of documentation Ujamaa will be following. The fieldwork done is Ujamaa’s foundation – conveying it effectively is central to everything related to Monitoring, Evaluation, and Accountability.

Coming out of the energizer, I quickly brushed over the documents again, going through set formats of reports that we conceptualized. I led that into a discussion. I tried to bring out the ineffectiveness of broad language. They are all culprits of reporting with broad language, with terms such as “capacity building” and “village meeting” dominating reports. Can people get any real information from those terms? No! We discussed the importance of going a few levels deeper – what did you build capacity in, what did you hold a meeting on, who was the meeting/training aimed at? It was quite a wall to break down. There is a long way to go to really expand that language. Working in development causes you to rethink many assumptions. These people I work with are intelligent and aware, but there are some basic skills they lack. Bringing those out and fighting with ingrained practices was quite a learning process.

Earlier they had written a report in a group. I had them reform the groups and try to use our discussion and the formats I had given them to rewrite the report. That activity legitimated my entire project. They asked a million questions about: what do you mean by expectations, what sort of agenda was there, is this title effective, what were my challenges? Flushing out the requirements for each section of the report format seemed to incur a step towards reporting enlightenment. The morning talked about data collection and analysis. Discussing the new report each group had furthered the realizations and understanding of what each section contained, where to put thoughts, what thoughts to include. It tied together all we had talked about for the whole day.

There process was not easy to get through and I doubted myself from the start. My workshop session was my first teaching experience where the material I presented was new and my own. It was liberating, but brought on huge insecurities. I loved it.