The following piece was difficult to write since it appears
to make a tall claim. All I can say is that it is based on events that actually
took place, and is true.
What started in
Nagaland…
It was in the fourth workshop in Nagaland, in 2000, that
participants stopped me and said they had something to share. All the education
stuff they were learning was certainly very useful but what they valued far more
was this: People from all the 16 tribes of the state were present in one room
and, for the first time, they said, were not fighting! The process had somehow
led all of them to feel like a family and they cherished this even more than
the curriculum that was emerging from it.
How did this happen, I wondered. It was not being attempted
(and in fact there was not even the awareness that something like this was
required in the first place). So what went right? A little probing led to the
realization that not being aware of who was from which tribe or occupied what
social / professional position, the facilitation process could not distinguish
between participants – no one was treated as being more ‘important’ or
‘different’.
A second feature was that much of the process revolved
around generating a common set of
experiences such as activities, school observations, classroom trialling, and
intensive group discussions around key questions that had a larger canvas while
also affecting state-specific decisions and implementation. The opportunity to
evolve a common vision, agree upon the aims and objectives around which the
curriculum would be built and developing consensus around the practical means
to be adopted – all this led to ‘feeling like a family.’
Could this effect - that had happened ‘by mistake’ - actually be
deliberately implemented? That is,
could disparate groups who believed they had conflicting interests be brought
together to ‘feel like a family’ through a consciously implemented version of
this process?
It was not long before an opportunity to test this presented
itself – in Afghanistan.
…Continued in
Afghanistan
‘My brother from India,’ said a fearsome-looking senior
member of the National Resource Group in Kabul, part of the Teacher Empowerment
Programme, in 2003-04. It was the first effort to implement a country-wide
in-service teacher training programme after the war. ‘My brother from India, do you know that we have in our group some people who are bandits! And we have
to develop training with them!’
Before I could respond, another equally fierce gentleman
thumped his desk, stood up and bellowed, ‘Our professor from India, when we
were fighting the Russians in the mountains, some people were sitting in luxury
in the USA!’ No one else seemed discomfited by this except me. How do you work
with a group where members seemed intent on settling long-standing personal
scores through you?
Once again it was really useful not to know who was exactly
what. During the security briefing, I had been given a small chart depicting
the various factions that had been at war with each other and now comprised the
post-war nation. I had carefully put the chart away without looking at it. And
had then thought about the kind of questions would work with this gathering of
conflicting factions.
Therefore, as in many other places, the first question the
participants got to work on was: ‘What games did you play as a child? And can
you name at least 40 of them?’ In just a few moments the mood in the group had
changed dramatically. People were gesturing, doing actions of the games they
were describing, prodding each other to remember the names of the games they
could recall, smiling more and more as their childhood seeped up and
transported them into another time when they didn’t have this animosity. From
then on, over the next several months, the process continued, with the fearsome
gentlemen becoming less and less ferocious till they were actually good
friends, and contributed greatly to the outcomes. Along with them, whatever
factions that might have been there within the group also shed such reservations as they might have had about the ‘others’. By the end, in fact, it
really was difficult to make out the groups that might have been there earlier….
And in a very
different setting
Could there be a more difficult situation than Afghanistan?
Actually, there could. During the thick of the LTTE-Sri Lankan Army war, I
found myself in a workshop for writers, about half of whom were Tamil with the
other half being Sinhala. Tamil writers arrived late to the venue, a few hours away from Colombo, as they had been held up
again and again along the way by police and other security authorities – on the
ground that they were Tamils moving around. One of the writers had just learnt that his
brother had been arrested by the Sri Lankan police, on suspicion. Tamil and Sinhala
writers were clearly unwilling to mix; in fact, there were many who did not
know the other group’s language or English. It was the sensitivity displayed by
the organizers and all others present that enabled the workshop to be held at
all. However, a sense of awkwardness and whispered conversations pervaded the atmosphere
and made it difficult to start.
Working through interpreters, one for each language, the
challenge was to have a group that achieved some degree of comfort with each
other and would relax sufficiently to enable a creative process to flow.
Listening to lectures from the facilitator, however wonderful, was unlikely to
achieve this. In this case the strategy of not knowing who was who was
obviously not going to work…
What did work, however, was the use of ‘idea triggers’,
which are ways to get people to think of things they otherwise would not. For
example, take two completely unrelated words (such as ‘rocket’ and ‘goat’) and see
if you can make a long and interesting sentence (at least 10 words long) that
contains both the words. (Try this
out a few times with the same two words and see what happens). Or, take an
ordinary object – such as a spoon – and think of a place where it will usually
never be found (e.g. on a branch high up on a tree) – and think of how it got
there, what happened afterwards – and you will soon begin to get a story in
your head.
As these ‘triggers’ began to be used, the ‘writer’ in the
participants began to come to the fore. They bounced ideas off each other,
laughing at the ridiculous and funny juxtapositions that were cropping up, teasing them into ideas for stories, applauding each others' creativity and slowly
forgetting that that they were two peoples affected by being on the opposite sides of an ongoing war…
