This blog is usually used to communicate,
celebrate and reflect on EduCARE’s successes; be it a successful
health project, a significant
milestone in community relationship building, or the start of a village-wide
environmental awareness campaign. We love to share the photos of smiling
interns side by side with satisfied community members, and recount that special
feeling of achieving something amazing together. This blog is usually a record
of the fruits of our labour.
In this post I have no grand event to
report, no milestone to reflect on and no photos of a crowd of community
members with EduCARE staff snapped after a long but fruitful day. This post
contains no fruit at all, only carefully prepared soil and the first suggestions
of a fresh green shoot.
Every morning and afternoon, our landlord,
a seventy-something year old man with a neat moustache and gravelly voice,
helps us tend our garden at the Rait intern house. With one of our main centre
goals being to maintain a sustainable house project, the veggie garden is very
important to us interns. With years of agricultural experience, “Uncle”
demonstrates how to prepare the soil, explains where and when to plant each
crop, and diligently monitors the watering schedule. We are all very excited
with the prospect of soon cooking and eating our own home-grown vegetables;perhaps,
a little too excited and a little too quick to throw seeds into the unprepared
soil of a new garden bed just in front of the veranda.
Our Uncle just shakes his head at this,
patiently gets the shovel and instructs us to loosen the soil in the small plot
of land. “Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncle shakes his head and smiles.
The next day, he brings a bag of cow manure, directs us to scatter it across
the small plot of land and then work the nutrient-rich goodness into the soil.
“Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncleshakes his head and smiles. The next
day, he brings three huge bags of dried leaves, scatters them over the plot of
land and leaves them there. We don’t ask about seeds this time, we just watch
and wait. The leaves stay there for days, weeks even, getting no attention
other than the occasional watering. As I write, we still haven’t planted any seeds
in that plot of land in front of the veranda. We realise now that there’s more
to gardening than throwing seeds into the dirt and hoping for the best.
Similarly,there is more to community
development than just throwing a project at the community and hoping it will
take root. When the Rait centre first initiated its figure-head women’s
empowerment project in March, the Young Women’s Association, it was assumed
that a range of other projects would inevitably shoot off, including skills
development and training programs, self-help groups and micro-enterprises. Things
are never that simple.
The women’s empowerment team in Rait has
learnt the importance of leg-work, liaising with stakeholders, comparing
options, exploring new avenues and finding creative solutions to unexpected
challenges. Take our mushroom farming project, for example. The project design
involves training a group of women in the art of mushroom cultivation,
providing a small interest-free loan to help with training and start-up costs,
and helping the women source materials and equipment to start their own
mushroom micro-enterprises at home. Sounds simple enough, right? Hold on, don’t
throw those seeds in that hard, compacted dirt just yet.
We’ve spent the last two months travelling
to agricultural research institutes and universities, communicating back and
forth with professors and mushroom experts, learning about mushroom cultivation
techniques, preparing cost analyses, and comparing training options. Only once
all of this behind the scenes legwork was done could we go to the women, who
expressed an interest in growing mushrooms, to tell them the good news. But
wait, you may have broken your back turning that soil, but you haven’t
introduced the manure yet!
The women of Rait live diverse and
complicated lives. Their time is split between domestic duties, child care,
social and community obligations, and a diverse range of income-generating
activities. There is a diverse mix of living and housing situations, from large
multi-roomed complexes, which house entire extended families, to simple two
room structures, and single rented rooms that are shared by each family. The
diversity of these women’s experiences poses some interesting challenges for
designing a project suitable for each of their living situations, schedules and
needs. From difficulties with finding two consecutive days to attend a training
course,to identifying a suitable spot in the house to allow the sensitive young
mushrooms to grow, communicating with each of the women requires multiple
visits to their homes (and lots of cups of chai). The language barrier poses
another problem and we often have to enlist the aid of a native-speaker. Every
visit presents a new challenge and requires some creative problem solving. It may
not be so glamourous, but this is what community development work really looks
like.
It takes time and a lot of back-breaking labour
to get the soil primed and ready for sowing.
We’d love for this blog post to be about
the success of our first mushroom farming training workshop, or to include a
photo of a smiling woman proudly presenting her crop of home-grown oyster
mushrooms. In the future, we hope to bring you these things, but for now all I
can share with you is the nitty-gritty of what community development really
looks like. We’ve put a lot of effort into laying the foundation of this
project, anticipating and solving challenges in creative ways, and tailoring
solutions to meet the individual and the collective needs of the women of Rait.
We are currently putting together individual contracts for each of the women,
to ensure the micro-credit process is both transparent and specific to each
woman’s needs. We plan to hold our first training workshop in early June; our
first mushroom crop should be ready by late July or early August.
We might not have anything to show for our
efforts just yet, but with such rich and carefully cultivated
soil, we are bound to have a successful crop soon enough.
Katherine Woolnough - Australia
Women's Empowerment Project Manager, Rait
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