Adventures in fishpond training workshops

The past week has been busy, busy, busy for me. Hence the lack of blog updates. I’ve started my training workshops and there has been a lot of prep for them.

My first one was on Monday in Chamangwana. It got off to a bad start but it was not our fault, honestly. The extension worker, Ephraim, for that area is a lazy cocky idiot. He was appointed by a priest and is as secure in his job as a tenured professor. I’ve tried to keep an open mind about him, but now I’m convinced my gut feeling was true. To begin he promised us he’d have the beneficiaries there by 7:30am. Well when we got there at 8:30am none of the villagers were there. That’s ok, being late here is normal. So I went to check out the workspace. Although I asked for the church hall, he had taken it upon himself to change the location. OK sure, as long as I have a safe place to work I really don’t care. However, when I went inside I kept hearing this buzzing. When I went to find the source of the buzzing I realized that there was a HUGE beehive in the corner of the room. Like thousands of bees, buzzing around the place! I was astonished. This was not a safe place to work. Women would be coming here with babies on their backs. How could I give them my full attention when every minute I’d be looking over my shoulder?? I understand that conditions may not be ideal here, no electricity, lack of table, chairs, etc. But this was unacceptable. So I went to look for another place. About a 15 min walk down the road was the church where I had originally asked and received permission to hold the workshops – the safe, clean, empty church. So I packed everything up and moved down there. After that the workshop proceeded as normal and all went well, the beneficiaries were a pleasure to work with. They were attentive and so thankful to receive the training. But as we were wrapping up the day, the cocky extension worker came up to me and said, ‘The next time you do one of these things, try not to be late.’ Oh man – I was fuming on the inside but kept my composure. The whole reason we were late was because of his ridiculous choice in location which forced me to move everything. I know, I know, there will always be these kinds of people you have to work with, but it doesn’t make it any easier or right.

The workshops the following days were fabulous. The extension workers (Triphonia and Gabriel) for the communities I had targeted were great. So organized, efficient, easy to work with and appreciative. The day went as smoothly as possible, which just reconfirms my impression of Ephraim.

These workshops were not like the conventional ones I am used to, especially since most of them in the past were targeted to academia and govt. The key here was to be creative. How do I reach out to a group of villagers who only spoke Chichewa and many of who were illiterate? I needed a translator, my co-worker Spriano helped with that (he has been soooo helpful. I would be lost without him). I also decided to stay away from big words, powerpoint slides and overhead projectors (there was no electricity anyway). Instead I used a flipchart and markers to make drawing of the concepts I wanted to get across. I drew ponds, fish, arrows for water flow, sun and moon for time of day, bags of manure, etc. I wanted to use as little lecture style presentation as possible. I tried to be more practical so I brought props like pipes and mesh. I also made sure to include practical work. I took everybody outside to show how to test for soil conditions (e.g. digging holes in the soil to test permeability since the ponds here are earthen). They laughed so hard at me when I took the hoe and started digging. It was great. I think they appreciated the fact that I didn’t act to good to dig a hole or get my hands dirty. I’m doing all this in a chitenje-skirt too.

While the training was going well and everyone seemed attentive I wanted to make sure the ideas were really being understood. Many times where there is a language barrier or knowledge gap too wide people just nod, smile or say I know. So I used pop-quizes throughout the day to test their understanding. For the most part they were getting it and I was so happy for that. It was a big fear of mine that I would get up there, babble on and not really teach them anything they would retain. I hope that the knowledge is retained for more than one day though. The NGO and its extension workers have planned to visit the villages regularly to ensure the knowledge is being applied as best it can under the circumstances (resources are always limited). I am in the process of creating a very basic yet informative training manual to help them with this task.

At the end of the workshops (as with every training session or meeting here) there are always speeches from the representative of each group in attendance. When I did mine I started off with a question: I asked them if they expected me to come back after I did my needs assessment. The village headwoman answered that they didn’t expect to see me again. They were so happy that I had returned to keep my promise. I remember the first time I went to their village to assess the state of their pond projects, one of the women came running up to us and yelled ‘What are you doing you thieves?!’ Now as I was eating Nsima with them during lunch that same woman was dancing around and singing (in Chichewa) ‘I am so proud of Najere!’ (Najere was the name they gave me when I first visited them after Spriano said I needed a Malawian name). I was so touched. These folk are too often let down by empty promises.

I wish I could stay longer to see them through more of their fish farm development projects. At least the training sessions will help. They lacked such basic information like which fish to grow, when to feed them, what to feed them, how they reproduced… During one on the sessions a man asked ‘Why do they need a male fish if the female fish lays the eggs?’ I know most people wouldn’t know this info but since you can Google search anything these days this info is not really out of the reach of most people – except those living in poverty, without an education, electricity or certainly no internet access. A huge problem with poverty alleviation is access. Access to info, training, markets, education, healthcare – things we take for granted. These are the topics that many of my friends, colleagues and myself are working towards.

I have 2 more workshops this coming week. I hope they go as well as the last two. I’ll blog about it soon. Promise.