Monday 27 April – Day 36

Happy Birthday tomorrow to Lizzie, an Abene Karantaa trustee!

…on a high. The first meeting of the planning team yesterday afternoon got off to a great start. I wasn’t sure how many people would attend the meeting. I hoped Bibeesh, a local association leader and key informant in the community said he would be there and bring a woman with him, to have equal representation. Miri, a mother who breast fed during the meeting came through him. She was very supportive and keen to get started with the assessment. She is also on the health committee at the village clinic, earns a living from farming and a business woman, from the administrative capital in the area, Ziguinchor. Bibeesh is on the local school committee, a member of the local development bank and farmer. They both represented Abene.

Diibril Diatta, from the village Albadar was one I had only spoken to about the meeting that morning, but he came, and brought along Lamin Diatta with him. Diibril chairs the youth association in his village, is a primary school teacher and is another key informant in the team. His friend Lamin is a local shopkeeper and business man. Representing the village Dianna were two women I hadn’t met before, Kandi Diatto and Isatu Sambo, who both work in farming, and selling and watering vegetables for a living. Yousoufa Diouf, from the Gambia, but currently living in Abene, is a mechanic with professional skills also including painting, welding. The group of 8, was made up of 4 men and 4 women, including myself, and 2 people from both Dianna and Albadar, and 3 from Abene.

I chaired the meeting, thanked everyone for coming and explained my plans for the participatory needs assessment. The first difficulty we encountered was which language to speak in. I started by speaking in French, but the French spoken here is different from my limited French, it wasn’t easy to communicate, and Isatu doesn’t know French. We decided to use Mandinka, and Lamin kindly translated for me to English and from my English to Mandinka.

By the end of the meeting, following my informal presentation and group discussion, I think everyone had a good idea of what we hope to get out of the assessment period, working together in collaboration with the community, involving the whole community to identify their needs, define the priorities and work together to make a plan of action to address the needs. Together we, or rather they, I hope, will identify a community vision of the future and sustainable plans to make it a reality.

I explained that the charity in London, Abene Karantaa is focussed on educational provision, but that the assessment would cover all areas of provision, not just education for a number of reasons. For example, it is useful to get the whole picture of a community as if one thing is lacking, such as health, or nutrition, or housing, or water, etc. that will have a knock on effect on education and be a barrier to learning. Apart from being a starting point for educational development in the community, I hope the assessment will also be a useful tool in the wider development of the community, encouraging participation and empowering poor and powerless groups.

The atmosphere of the meeting was positive and enthusiastic. Miri suggested they each go and discuss the plans within their groups in their communities and feedback at the next meeting. I was keen to consider the methods we would use to generate information, including cross-checking, what information we will need to gather and who will get it. We agreed to leave such discussion and decisions till the next meeting, a week’s time. I am optimistic about the group and the outcome of the meeting. Just a few hours before I wasn’t entirely clear on what I wanted to get out of it on this first day. This is a new experience for me as well as them. But I don’t think I could have hoped for a better outcome. A few days before I wasn’t sure how I was going to put a planning team together at all. The book I am using as a guide for the whole process, Partners in Planning, Rifkin and Pridmore, talks about professionals, working with members of the local community as if there are usually a few people from an outside organisation (such as Abene Karantaa) involved in this keen of assessment, but in this case it is just me in the role of ‘professional’, and I’ve never done this before! However, I think the experience I got from setting up an animal welfare charity while I was living in Spain, has given me a good grounding in working with community members in a different culture.

The book, Partners in Planning, talks about 2 objectives for the assessment, one being to generate information, identify and prioritise needs and make a plan of action, the other to provide opportunities for community members (particularly the poor and powerless) to gain skills and experience. I wasn’t really clear on what the skills and experience were that people would get from it, until after a quick phone call to my mum back in the UK. I was looking at it from a western perspective, thinking it would look good on a CV, but I couldn’t believe anyone had CVs here and the skills wouldn’t be useful to them as employment is different here. But my mum pointed out to me that the assessment would involve skills that are easily transferrable to business planning, a skill that she had found to be lacking here from her knowledge of the area. There may be 5 snack bars in the vicinity but that doesn’t seem to stop people putting up another one. The skills they could gain from this experience would involve researching the market, making costings, budgets and planning for long-term sustainability. All of which she pointed out would be very useful skills, empowering individuals. And so I am learning as I go along. As Yousoufa says, life is a university!

Together the planning team has decided to limit the assessment to the 3 villages of Abene, Dianna and Albadar, The later 2 being the closest to Abene, at about 1.5 km distance. A later continuation of this assessment could include other villages, with potentially greater needs, but it was agreed that at this stage we would keep it manageable and be realistic about what we could achieve together in 2 months.

The next planning team meeting will be on Sunday 3 May, at 4pm in Abene’s primary school again. The group will feedback on their discussions within their community groups and I hope we will start to identify what information we need to gather, how to find it out and who will do what. In later stages of the assessment we will be able to review and interpret the information gathered.

I feel a real sense of achievement after the meeting and hopeful for the next 2 months. It feels amazing to be the catalyst of a participatory community development project. Alahamdulilahi. I am however aware that it is easier for everyone to be happy and enthusiastic at the beginning, and that we are bound to encounter difficulties. I will of course do everything within my means to ensure it goes well. Inshallah.

At the end I explained that I didn’t necessarily need to chair the next meeting and that perhaps we could have a rotating chair each week. So next week it will be someone different.

On a different, cultural note. I am living with nature. The other day I went in to the kitchen with my torch in the night and found I had disturbed a bat in the house! Then there are the over-sixed ants that share the kitchen with us, running up and down and in any direction across the walls and surfaces. The rats that gnaw at the ceiling above my bed in the night. Every time I am sure they will make a hole and fall through on top of me. But it hasn’t happened so far! The frogs that live in the well, the water I shower and cook with. The cockroach I found in the kitchen the other day and the funny shaped armoured insect I had in my hand briefly when I went to pick up a fork. Outside you are surrounded by varying numbers of chickens, goats, cows and pigs. Odd noises come out of the bush, I’m sure cows here make a different noise from the kind I was used to in Somerset! The whole village feels like a farm. Dogs lie sprawled in the middle of the dirt-track road. It’s a wonder more of them aren’t killed by the cars that speed up and down. I have seen goats standing on their hind legs nibbling at food from a high branch on a tree. Chickens sunning themselves with their wings spread out, and all of the above doing their best to make babies!

My rubbish goes in two piles, the food scraps to the animals to eat, and the plastic and tins to be burned or reused. I have found the added value in a 1,000 CFA pot of Chocopain chocolate and peanut spread (my favoured alternative to Tesco Finest Triple Chocolate Cookies). Tupperware! Hawa (my new British friend here, who I had lunch with yesterday at her house) has been getting equally excited about plastic pots. Very useful for storing food in. Protecting it from mice, chickens, sand and countless other things that would otherwise find their way in to your supplies. Lots of things, including the last things you would expect are sold in little, tiny, plastic bags with a knot tied in them. Powered milk, tiny, tiny bags, which I buy to have in my café touba in the morning, mustard powder, washing powder, ground up garlic, salt, sugar, peanut butter, even water and milk. It´s all sold in little plastic bags.

One of the women at Yousoufa’s uncle’s house (the place I am now using the blog from, as they have electricity (when there is power), but not a phone line or internet, is always asking me where my mobile phone is. She wants to swop it for hers. I have come to understand that this - like the complete stranger in the street this week who saw the cup attached to the pannier bag on the back of my bike (I bring it out with me to drink the café touba from) and said she wanted it – is just friendly banter. People’s way of getting to know you and have a joke. I’ve learnt that the most suitable response is to agree to give your mobile phone, or cup, or whatever it happens to be to the person, but for them to wait until you’ve finished with it first! A diplomatic way of saying refusing their request!