I would first like to sing the praises of Tenwek's Community Health teams. They do outreach to communities who otherwise would not have access to health or educational services. From individual, group, and community capacity-building to interventions in clinical, school-based, hygiene, and water sanitation programs, Community Health is there! Their impact reaches so wide and varies across numerous community needs. In an earlier blog I posted a picture of the Community Health sign, which I recently learned in Kipsigis reads, "prevention is better than a cure."
On Monday, I went with the Community Capacity Building team to Kitaima to facilitate the community's "first interaction." This team was "right up my ally" of what I studied in my graduate social work program with a focus in Community-Centered Integrated Practice, which is a fancy term for community organizing. Like most group facilitations, we began by assigning members different roles (chairperson, secretary, time keeper, etc.) and setting group rules and expectations. As you can see, group expectations of the interaction range from "how to interact with people" to "how to keep indigenous and exotic poultry." Of course with any good capacity-building, you need a good team building exercise! Pictured below is a group playing a game which is probably familiar to you--the human knot. Personally, I find more enjoyment in "supervising" than "participating," after factoring in the variable of whether or not the participants chose to practice personal hygiene on this particular morning.
On Monday, I went with the Community Capacity Building team to Kitaima to facilitate the community's "first interaction." This team was "right up my ally" of what I studied in my graduate social work program with a focus in Community-Centered Integrated Practice, which is a fancy term for community organizing. Like most group facilitations, we began by assigning members different roles (chairperson, secretary, time keeper, etc.) and setting group rules and expectations. As you can see, group expectations of the interaction range from "how to interact with people" to "how to keep indigenous and exotic poultry." Of course with any good capacity-building, you need a good team building exercise! Pictured below is a group playing a game which is probably familiar to you--the human knot. Personally, I find more enjoyment in "supervising" than "participating," after factoring in the variable of whether or not the participants chose to practice personal hygiene on this particular morning.
The exercise was followed by brainstorming and dialogue around the question "what are the knots in your families, groups, and communities?" The participants broke up into groups and identified Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) in overcoming these challenges. A pattern identified amongst all the groups was the presence of a strong community bond that, while it upheld the community as a whole, failed to motivate individual family members to work hard. Many participants lamented that the women are left to do all the work of raising children, caring for animals, and tending to crops at home, while the men leave and may or may not do any work outside the home. However, I do not want to make the men out to be focus of the problem, because the men present at the meeting were intelligent, hardworking individuals who cared very much about affecting change. Kitaima was a very welcoming community that appreciated the help of the capacity-building team. As a first encounter, it will be interesting to see how the community pulls together to achieve significant outcomes.