Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Communication Breakdown

We’ve been through a charla or two (or three or four) regarding “Effective Communication Techniques” during PC training sessions and I dare say almost all PCVs had a Speech class in high school and college. We know more or less how to tailor our messages to our audience but we’re communicating and working with a different culture.  Are these techniques actually useful in the real world? Since I’ve been at site I’ve no doubt made mistakes when attempting to communicate my messages and I’ve also dealt with cultural barriers that I was not prepared for  that seem impossible to overcome in the real Ecuadorian world.

I’m going to tell you the story about my first Comité de Pro-Mejoras meeting in my community. I was to be formally introduced during this meeting as well as given the chance to talk about the tourism initiative in my community. The meeting started late of course because we had to wait for half of the people who formally signed up for the Comité (two years ago) to attend to legally hold a meeting. I sat in the front of the room with my counterpart, the secretary and the treasurer. The remaining 24 people sat in the perimeter of the room leaving a sea of desks and chairs between them and us. In the middle of the room there was a bookcase and a filing cabinet where four women sat on the other side, hidden from those in the front of the room. My counterpart began the meeting by talking about a sensitive subject regarding the construction of a communal house and a park at the school. About seven people people had opinions: a few had opinions that they liked to talk about for a good ten minutes, some had opinions that were more important than others so they interrupted people who were already giving opinions, one had opinions that needed to be shouted and the other 75% of the room, well, had no opinion. These people just sat in the tiny little school desks looking uninspired and uninterested for the entirety of the meeting. Almost all of them were women. I couldn’t understand why someone would sign up to be a part of a committee and not participate whatsoever and even hide from the view of the committee leaders. Lesson learned: This is common in the culture of my community.

 My next anecdote regards a meeting my counterpart and I held to form a Comité de Turismo. Since it was our fourth meeting regarding the subject I was beginning to lose my optimism for forming a group of people to help me develop a Plan of Operations. This meeting initiated like all of the others which have become characteristically negative with a “this just won’t happen” sort of attitude when all of a sudden my counterpart said “let’s stop with the negativity”. The room went silent and I took the floor. I literally drew out my idea of a structure of the Comité on a dry-erase board and directly asked them questions. It turns out that I failed to communicate to my audience that at this time we only need a small group of people, decision-makers if you will, not the entire community. Within ten minutes they all agreed to form a Comité de Turismo and elected two supervisors and decided the rest will be the executors. Lesson learned: get the people directly involved in the conversation to know if you are getting your message across and when there is negativity in the air bring it to everyone’s attention and ask for more positivity. These two examples illustrate that we can indeed change our method of communication to foster idea generation and pro-activity but there are some things that we will have to learn to deal with.

I supposed that’s where all of those “techniques” we’ve learned come into play. To freshen your memory I’ve given a short summary of the techniques that I find to be useful as a PCV in Ecuador.

Participatory communication:

Without going into a tangent about facilitation (I think we’ve had enough of that) I will simply say that as a PCV we’ll certainly be more effective if we talk with people rather than at them. During charlas or reuniones we need to make a conscious effort to get those in attendance to voice their opinions and contribute to the conversation. If two heads are better than one, then imagine what eight or nine could do.

Multi-methods of communication:

Sometimes it is necessary to bring in a visual to illustrate the message you’re trying to deliver. Could you convince an eco-club how cool a tire garden would be without showing them a picture of one?

Simplify your message:

Shout out PCVL Ian on this one. In the book “Made to Stick” they emphasized how important it is to simplify your message. Simplify in the sense that it’s best to leave out all of the fluff and unnecessary details that will just complicate and scramble your message. I doubt the participants of a family garden would really care about the scientific names of the microorganisms living in that compost pile you’ve been working on.

Active listening:

Effective communication should go both ways. You need to be able to listen just as well as you speak. As a PCV one of our most important jobs is to listen to our community members. I’m going to say the ‘f’ word again; we are here to be facilitators. Let your project members do a lot of the talking and come up with their own ideas.

The purpose of this post is not to give a lesson on effective communication but rather, hopefully, spark conversation regarding what we’ve learned thus far when attempting to effectively communicate with host country nationals. How do cultural barriers affect the value of our message? Has timidity been a problem for you with children and women? Have you had language barriers affecting your method of communication as well? Has your gender played a role in the way your message has been received? How do we know if anyone received our message and will they give us feedback?

I would like to facilitate participatory communication and ask, what do you think? We’re actively listening.


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