A good kick in the ass

Today I led a workshop on PACA tools. Quick overview: PACA tools (Participatory Analysis for Community Action) are a series of activities that health extension PCVs like myself use to work with a community group to begin the process of identifying resources and needs. The idea is that the PCV acts as a facilitator during these activities, guiding the community group to identify their specific needs and the resources available to them in their community. The grand scheme behind this is that once a community group has identified their needs and resources, they can then begin to develop an action plan for how to meet their identified need, using the local resources available. Sustainable development in a nutshell. Kind of a neat idea.
At the CAPJ, we are planning to work with many different community groups to confront the causes of HIV transmission on one hand (ignorance of how it’s transmitted and how to prevent transmission, risky behavior, etc) and the effects of HIV on the other (economic loss due to inability to work, discrimination, illness, death, etc). Therefore, the members of CAPJ are likely going to be conducting the PACA tools with various community groups once we figure out all the groups we’ll be working with. Interesting sidenote: I’ve only recently discovered that the staff of CAPJ is more than just me, Magloire, Lidie, and Chistiane, the only four people I’d met until this week; there were seven people at the meeting today!
So, to continue: today, I was supposed to begin training the CAPJ members on how to conduct the PACA tools so that they will be capable of conducting the PACA tools with other community groups – a training of trainers of sort. In French. Now, I consider myself to be a pretty good facilitator, generally speaking, after facilitating many workshops myself and also training others to facilitate workshops for PHE for two years. But that was in English, and in a cultural context that I understood. Here, I feel a little bit like a fish out of water, because I’m trying to facilitate in French and in a Cameroonian cultural context.
Just some examples of how both culture and language work against me here. In America and in English, I can figure out when people understand me by the way they respond to me (both with verbal and nonverbal clues) – certain actions and words carry cultural significance. For example, attentive, focused faces, without side conversations or fidgeting usually means people are listening, engaged, understanding; the lack of a question often indicates understanding. Here, the same behavior here might mean that people are confused but just hiding it or it could mean that they understand. In Cameroonian schools, there is not a lot of encouragement of asking questions. Most schoolwork involves memorization and repetition, so I think people are taught early not to ask questions even if they don’t understand. Therefore, it can be hard for me to know when people understand and when they don’t. Even if I could tell when people were understanding me well, there’s not just the cultural barrier, but the language barrier. In English, I can think on my feet and deviate from the planned script if people don’t understand something. Here, I don’t feel like I always have the capacity to just “play it by ear” and jump in with the correctly-phrased, culturally-appropriate question to steer things in the right direction when things get off-course.
Fortunately, Magloire was there, to remind me yet again (not intentionally, but just with his actions) of how remarkable an exception he is to the typical Cameroonian. He definitely had a better pulse on the progress workshop than I did, jumping in more than a few times to ask if everyone understood what I was saying, which was met every time with an answer in the negative from at least one person. Not only that, he always seemed to understand what I was saying and then was able to re-explain what I had just said in a way that made sense to the others.
With Magloire’s help, I chugged through the first of what will be multiple PACA trainings. It took longer than I thought it would, but I think it came out alright. At the end, we discussed some ways that the PACA tool I had taught today (doing a community map) could have been done better, and discussed trying it again next time in a different way.
For me, the most positive result was that leading the workshop jumpstarted my motivation. Ever since I arrived at post, I’ve been reserved, tentative in almost everything that I do. It’s a real effort to put myself out there, more so than usual. I feel reluctant to do even simple things, like go to the market and buy food. The reason is because I don’t quite know what to do – not just in certain situations, but at all. When some guy at the market starts harassing me – “hey, you live alone? You need a man.” “No I’m happy living alone.” “That’s crazy. When can I see you again?” – or better yet, when what I’m used to is being just another person on the sidewalk in the streets of New York, but all of a sudden now, I’m The White Girl in village and everyone, their mother, and their kids notices me, I don’t quite know how to respond. There are unwritten rules for behavior in any culture. In America, I know those rules – they dictate my life, they help me organize my life. Here, I don’t know those rules. It’s enough to make me want to hole up in my house with a book all day, everyday. At least a book won’t call me “La Blanche!”
So, in the midst of my reluctance to do, well, anything, this was at least doing something. It also made me realize that I derive great motivation from the quest for improvement; I’ll ask myself, “okay, I did something well, but next time, how can I do it better?” Until now, I hadn’t really done anything, at least nothing against which I could measure myself for next time. However, today, I tried to lead a PACA needs assessment activity; I know I can do this better. But the group was understanding and forgiving of my ineptitudes, and gave suggestions for how I can improve the next time I try to lead another training (next week!), and I learned a little bit from this experience about how I can do better next time. After it was all over, I felt this surge of energy and inspiration and motivation to work so hard so that it’s better next time. The kind that I haven’t felt since college. It was a good feeling.