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.
