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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