Postcards Collected: Comments on Distrobution and Meetings

You remem­ber that in a pre­vi­ous entry, I talked about all the post­card book­lets get­ting dis­trib­uted by the efforts of the com­mu­nity with­out prompt­ing from either me or the NGO. Each ham­let has received the book­lets dif­fer­ently, and I expect dif­fer­ent kinds of responses on the post­cards as a result.

We had great par­tic­i­pa­tion from the ham­lets where book­lets quickly reached indi­vid­ual houses and a promi­nent mem­ber of that com­mu­nity is invested in the project. In some cases, this pos­i­tive recep­tion was rein­forced by a group meet­ings about the project. For some ham­lets, a mem­ber of the com­mu­nity picked book­lets up form the office but didn’t dis­trib­uted it to the com­mu­nity until I prompted them to. In other cases, the book­lets were dis­trib­uted with­out much invest­ment, usu­ally because the dis­trib­u­tor did not read the book­lets before hand­ing them out. The ideal sit­u­a­tion was when even dis­tri­b­u­tion from an invested insider was later rein­forced by input from out­siders trusted by the com­mu­nity. When infor­ma­tion came twice from sources that are famil­iar with com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the com­mu­nity but employ dif­fer­ent style for doing so, the infor­ma­tion sticks on var­i­ous lev­els for dif­fer­ent peo­ple. While dis­tri­b­u­tion has been imper­fect, the process has been inter­est­ing and illus­tra­tive. We could not man­age an even dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem because the com­mu­nity took that over them­selves and because the peo­ple at the NGO are over­worked and only avail­able for cer­tain meet­ings. Work­ing in trans­la­tion leaves me out of con­trol of much of the process. This dif­fers from the method in Guatemala, I per­son­ally com­mu­ni­cated with each fam­ily involved in the project at least three times in the course of dis­trib­ut­ing and col­lect­ing postcards.

In the vil­lage of Yankoo, the local com­mu­nity ani­ma­tor was enthu­si­as­tic and invested. Navin from the NGO who is skilled at giv­ing ener­getic pre­sen­ta­tions facil­i­tated a dis­cus­sion. More and more peo­ple arrived as Navin read post­cards allowed and expounded on the his­tory of Guatemala.

The com­mu­nity ani­ma­tor asked ques­tion after ques­tion until even­tu­ally the rest of the com­mu­nity joined in with their own ques­tions. “Here, the women work beside the men. Do they do the same there?” “How do they spend their Fair Trade pre­mium?” “What is the edu­ca­tion sys­tem like?” “How do they make their organic fer­til­izer?” “A lot of peo­ple have a habit of drink­ing here. Do they get drunk there too?” I answered their ques­tions as best as I could and encour­aged them to ask them­selves in the post­cards they write. After the meet­ing, descend­ing the steep val­ley back down to the road, I asked Navin how he thought the meet­ing went. He thought it went very well. He said one of the farm­ers com­mented to him that he had read every sin­gle post­cards, and by the end he had tears rolling down his cheeks.

In another vil­lage, 11 Num­ber (named after the old plan­ta­tion demar­ca­tion for that area), I was on my own and depended on a few young peo­ple who had stud­ied Eng­lish in Dar­jeel­ing to trans­late. Luck­ily, one per­son had attended the meet­ing the pre­vi­ous day in Yankoo. Before I could even start, he began explain­ing all sorts of things to his neigh­bors. One per­son showed me slips of paper where he had metic­u­lously gone through all the ques­tions that the peo­ple in Santa Anita asked and answered every one of them. In this cases, the meet­ing was dri­ven by the ideas that had already been cir­cu­lat­ing about the project, thanks both to the book­let itself and sec­ond hand infor­ma­tion. Sev­eral infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions hap­pened at once and enthu­si­asm built with the banter.

One girl in this meet­ing was very quiet, but grad­u­ally spoke more and more, reveal­ing her enthu­si­asm and her good Eng­lish. “Aren’t you going to have a meet­ing in the next vil­lage?” I told her that none was planned, but I could cer­tainly have a meet­ing. She offered to take me to the vil­lage and run the meet­ing, which sur­prised me given the shy start. I eagerly accepted her offer and we were off to Godandora.

In Godan­dora, peo­ple had not received book­lets. There were sev­eral with one fam­ily, but they had not dis­trib­uted them. It was dif­fi­cult to gather peo­ple together because they had no prior knowl­edge of the project or of a meet­ing. Of the peo­ple we did gather, inter­est was min­i­mal expect for two women. They took extra copies of every­thing and sug­gested the houses they would take the book­lets and post­cards to.

As for Hars­ing, the com­mu­nity ani­ma­tor and pre-school teacher ran the meet­ing. You could tell he was expe­ri­ence in teach­ing lit­tle kids. He got a siz­able group of peo­ple together, every­one read the post­cards together, and wrote responses on the spot.

I can’t wait to see what they wrote. I will be mak­ing copies and coor­di­nat­ing with trans­la­tor this week. Hope­fully I can post a few post­cards here soon.