I really enjoyed the speakers from this week. It was really interesting to hear about the experiences of the two grad students. They’ve been in our place, and they actually took the opportunity to go to Africa and design water pumping and filtration systems for villages. Instead of just hearing about villages not having clean water and responding passively like so many of us do when we hear about these issues, they actually went there and created devices to improve villagers’ quality of living.
It really got me thinking. One of the grad students, Tim Carter, was only a few years older than me. He started going to Africa and working on these projects while he was still an undergrad. He had a direct impact on those people’s lives, and he didn’t have to wait until after he graduated from college to do it. Working on a project like that is something I can really see myself doing, and I’ll definitely keep my eyes peeled for an opportunity like that in the future.
The speakers were also an example of our readings for the week being put to use in real life. In Chasca Twyman’s “Participatory Conservation? Community-Based Natural Resources in Botswana,” she says that community participation in a project or campaign decreases when it’s presented to them in a way that doesn’t let them take ownership of it. She calls this “planner-centered participation,” which results when project planners see community members as simple pawns in their plan – if the villagers follow the plan of the developers, costs will stay low and everything will work like it’s supposed to. Not surprisingly, this usually doesn’t work out too well.
The other kind of participation Twyman discusses, and the kind experienced by the grad student speakers during their time in Africa, is “people-centered participation.” This is a type of process that empowers local people by giving them control over local projects, meeting community needs, and bringing issues to the attention of everyone in the village. In order to make people care about something, they have to feel like they have some stake in it.
This is what Carter and the other grad student, Darryl Pearson, encountered in their work in Cameroon, Kenya, and the Gambia. In Carter’s project, the entire community helped to dig the trenches for the pipes to deliver water to the community pumps. In Pearson’s work, he sat down with the village elders to figure out how to help them, and then built the water delivery system with the help of locals. In both cases, the grad students put their projects in the hands of the community and let them play a vital role in making it happen, which gave the villagers much more reason to get involved with it.
It’s now one week until we leave for Botswana, and I’m incredibly excited. I hope all of our research turns out to be fruitful, and that our six days spent in Botswana are filled with exciting new experiences. I can’t wait!
No comments:
Post a Comment