Dreams do come true - with a little help from Discovery, Dreaming, Design and Delivery
I had a dream that there would be some way to help the people in the small Nepalese community of Phakhel that wouldn't require masses of foreign (i.e. from outside the village) help. Didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew I would and I thought Ai (Appreciative Inquiry) might hold the key!
I first voiced this dream in the summer of 1998 and in November of that year met Mac Odell. He had adapted Ai to work with villagers so that we ran a sort of mini-4D cycle (Discovery, Dreaming, Design and Delivery) in 2 hours (which is all the time these subsistence level farmers had to give us). We trained and worked with a few consultants he was planning to use on a USAID-funded project... in the event they didn't use it further at that time. This was exactly what I needed for Phakhel so I got some of my Nepali colleagues enthused and we went off to try it out.
To start out with, most villagers see white skin and ask for money, but in Phakhel, where I was well known, they were just curious about sharing learning and about discovering what it was that I actually DO.
There was a core group of people who were almost always there when we had our meetings (every few months), but otherwise we just worked with whoever showed up. I was later asked to work with the next village as well. Basically, I came about three times a year and met with the villagers and helped them with the process and when they got stuck, helped to un-stick them.
We separated the men, women and children into different groups and came together to share information. Did it change the dialogue in the village? Definitely! One man got up to say, "This really brings it home to me. We've been bloody lazy! For the past 40 years we have been holding our hands out for aid from the government and what do we get? We fight, we can't agree on anything and we don't feel good about ourselves. Forty years ago, we did a lot together because there was no one else to help us and you know what? We were proud of what we did! We were proud of our village. Are any of you proud now? No? Well, let's do this together and be proud again!"
And, of course, they are doing it. It took some time for them to get used to the methodology, but it is easy enough to 'crank the crank' as it were. The problems for sustainability arise when they encounter obstacles. Unless there is someone with them who is trained in facilitation skills, they get entrenched in old and familiar behaviour patterns and get stuck. At present, this is not the case for the school project, but when it happens; they have asked me to come back. In the meantime, they operate on their own without outside interference.
The methodology we used was as follows:
Discovery was asking them to tell us a story about something that had gone well in the village, which they had done together. We had them draw on flip chart paper because most of them were illiterate. Extra time was necessary in the beginning to get the women to even pick up a pen!
Dreaming was asking them what kind of a village they would like for their children and grandchildren, again getting them to draw.
Design was more difficult, we asked them to plan... and discovered that people who couldn't read didn't seem to have developed the logical sides of their brains enough... they didn't know how to plan, so this had to be taught! (It took a while for me to figure this out. I didn't understand why they couldn't do it... I was using the right word, I knew I was. They knew what it meant, but not how to DO it). We worked simply, beginning with prioritising what had to come first, then setting out steps and identifying obstacles and what kind of organisation might be needed. To teach how to plan, we worked with things they were already doing (like when to plant their crops and the steps they needed to take) and built upon that.
Finally came Delivery - except this sort of got stuck onto the Design work. When they came back to report on the Design, they all stood up and went straight into who committed to do what. It was quite marvellous.
What can we do right now? This is important and is a step that Mac added. If we all do something together in five or ten minutes, it gives everyone a good feeling and people see how much can be achieved in a short time if everyone helps.
Then we do a debrief, and finally we get people to dance and sing, to give a fun memory of the work they have done.
The villagers raised 34,000 Rupees (a phenomenal amount for a community of 88 families where the average income of a family of six is about 10,000 Rupees per year) and had sunk the school foundations when I visited them in May 2000. They then built upon the foundations (these needed to stabilise during monsoon). And guess what?!!
1. They have received a grant from PLAN International to build the first model secondary school. The grant is 2.2 million Rupees. The school will have 14 classrooms on two floors. When I visited in March 2001, the first floor was finished. PLAN heard what they were doing and knew they were onto a winner. Like everyone else, they want to be successful, so why not follow success?
2. The villagers have now raised in excess of 162,000 Rupees themselves!!! This money goes for the registration fee (secondary schools are not provided by the government and they require a fee of 50,000 Rupees for registration), which has already been paid, and for paying the teacher's salaries and buying equipment and books, as the government does not support secondary schools in any way. Teachers would earn on average between 4,000 and 8,000 Rupees per month.
They seem to move from strength to strength with this. What I am being told indicates a strong community organisation behind this work, led by an unmarried lady in her forties, a 70-year old grandfather and another gentleman in his forties who does have children, now attending secondary school far away from home in Kathmandu.
In THIS case and for THIS project it has truly become sustainable. Let us admire and appreciate what the villagers have done!
We did produce a short 4-minute film of the process in Phakhel, which is available in the UK for £9.99 (including VAT and P & P within the UK), so if anyone is interested I'd be delighted to send them a copy while they last.