Dry-zone and the fellows

Last week the entire course went to the dry-zone area in the middle of Myanmar.

After a 12 hour bumpy bus ride we arrived to the quiet countryside, where we stayed for the next 3 days. During these days we experienced the small communities, local people and different cultures. In this post we are going to share about our meeting with the fellows, who are the local volunteers of the area devoting their lives to improve and develop their villages.

The fellows are villagers who participated in the fellowship-program, facilitated by Actionaid. In this program the fellows are being empowered by the tools ActionAid provides, as well as learning how to empower the rest of the community. When working to change and improve a community it is important to know where power comes from and how to use it.

There is the power within (yourself), the power with (with others), the power to act and the power over (others).

For the fellows it is very important to have power within, because they will be facing a lot of challenges in their work to improve the living standards of the community.

The power within have to overcome all of the personal obstacles and resistance from the family, neighbors, friends and so on. According to most of the fellows, building trust to the local community is the hardest task they face. In some cases it can take 5 years even gaining their respect. Both because the community has to believe on the fellows intentions for the greater good, but also because they need to risk and invest some of their energy for the course.

They also need the power with, in order to work together with the villagers, not forcing solutions on them. Only by working together as a unit, they will be able to accomplish their goals, as no man can change the systems alone.

Very importantly, they also need the power to act upon their ideas and hopes for the future, otherwise nothing will change. The fellows need the contacts and social respect to reach not only the other citizens, but also the authorities on a higher level.

The fellows main tool for achieving the different kinds of power as described above, comes from the training given by ActionAid and is called the Villagebook. The villagebook gives some tools for problem solving and village planning. The fellows create the villagebook together with the rest of the community. It contains important information about the village, the problems they are facing and how to solve them. Making them aware of the common problems they are all sharing, and thereby helping them to come up with a joint solution.

To sum up, our meeting with the fellows showed a real life example of both the theory we have learned in the sessions, and also how ActionAids programs work in practice.

A very inspiring experience!