"Speaking too soon"
Monday morning, 9:00 am, journaling:
I had a "proudest moment" this morning. Markus called to tell me he was at the garden--now, since I have been gone, this was a first step in seeing if my efforts thus far have been sustainable, acquired community ownership, built capacity--buzzword buzzword buzzword. The group was in charge of watering, making new seed beds, attending and running Monday meetings etc. So, I met the folks at the garden beaming with pride from their hard work! 8:00 am, five people making seed beds, transplanting the bright green cabbage and onions that were sprouting up along with leafy stalks of carrots and beet root! It was so beautiful! I picked up the log book where Monday meeting minutes are recorded and read about the meetings I missed--it ran like clockwork,--my presence is valued, but not needed--time to come home!!;) just kidding--actually, it's time to expand the garden now that we are seeing the fruits (veggies) of our labor and work on plans for successful distribution of food!
Monday afternoon, 4:00 pm--cross-eyed and drooling:
Ooooooooooooooo folks--my excitement of the morning was a false sense of tremendous accomplishment. I can laugh about it now, well actually I was laughing about it when it happened but only because I didn't want to start crying! So what is "it"? you may ask? Major cross-cultural conflict resolution that I had to carry out at our Monday meeting. I had prepared a full agenda of the usual prayer and opening remarks, a fun personal check-in since I hadn't seen people for a week, news from the training a colleague and I attended and then the usual discussion about the garden and BEN Bikes. Ooooooooooooo silly me--apparently the folks working diligently in the garden this morning were disregarding the group decision from the previous meeting. They took it upon themselves to make personal plots because some groups were slacking on watering duties. So they thought if everyone had their own plot, it was their own fault if their crops died and not the group's fault. Well, 1) this wasn't a decision made by consensus, so here was arguing about that; 2) our garden isn't big enough for everyone to have their own plots, so there was arguing about that; and 3) reading between the lines, I realized that some people were planning to keep this food for themselves instead of the intended purpose being for the clients they do home base care for. I tried a few things--I had Augustinus introduce the"talking stick" exercise in order to reduce 10 people shouting at once. Augustinus knows this activity and I thought it would be better received by him than me; this was until the "stick" (which was actually a wooden bird) was rolled into the middle of the floor in disgust by Mirjam. She represents the Lutheran church....awesome. Then in broken Rukwangali, I tried to explain that "we're not going forward, people, we're in a standstill chasing our tail, we're not even going backwards!" That got a laugh, a few nods in agreement, and then more shouting ensued. At this point, still on agenda item #1, I quietly left the room, got a marker and some flip chart paper from Ndadi and came back to halt the meeting. Together we revisited the MAIN AIM of the garden so that there was no confusion, we decided that we're disregarding the decisions that were made last week, and we're deciding on a work schedule now. Then, I gave a brief talk on how arguing about "who said what when" isn't helping people who are starving and need to take their ARV's. We decided to skip the rest of the agenda and follow up next week so we could go work in the garden.
Now, a month ago I would have said "it was a nightmare," but I'm way over that. And I would have beat myself up about getting prematurely excited about our progress just a few hours before, but I know all too well that things change from minute to minute around here. While it was a bit of a shock, that was only because I had been gone from the chaos for 7 days and I needed a brief readjustment period! Thanks for easing me back in Nkurenkuru! :)
