Shifting.....

Monday, August 3rd, 2009 – learning zone and beyond!

Today’s sessions took place at EWB’s head office. How was I feeling that morning? I’ll admit anxious until I took a shower. The house now had about 20 people in it total as the long term OVS had arrived the night before to start their month long training. Their placements are 13 months long. We couldn’t help but tell them that we thought they were crazy for going for that long! Many of them had been overseas at some point and had felt that ¾ months was not enough and so here they were, back for more!
The first part of the day began at the office with an intro to going overseas with Parker (one of the founders of EWB) and continued with an exploration of the Sunflower case study led by Kristy. We mapped out the project proposal with post-its and tried to expand each aspect of our observations. What would make this project fail? It was a very revealing experience to see that there are so many factors I had not even thought to consider… we did a failure analysis and discussed, discussed, discussed. At lunch, we talked about the value of 1 JF versus 4 locals. I’m not sure even now if we actually came to a solid conclusion that we would be more valuable than a local. It will take us time to try and understand and partake in the culture while a local doesn’t even think about things like that. We bring in our judgments and ideas; they may not necessarily work outside our North American sphere. Who are we to impose these on people we know so little about? On the flipside though, we are volunteers, the mere fact that we want to be there shows that we have commitment and a desire to be part of a positive change. And there have been very positive, inspiring changes that have involved the work of an overseas volunteer.
The afternoon: PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) techniques etc
-how to facilitate and not dominate
-ask questions that allow for expressive answers, not just yes or nos (leading vs non leading)
-community mapping (value of it and how it can be different when done by different stakeholders)
etc etc ...

One of the most memorable events of pre-dep:
The ZONE pushing:
Question: How do the homeless end up on the streets of Toronto?
Time: 1.5 hours.
GO.
Go where? Who do we ask? What areas do we go to? Do we talk to homeless people? I guess we’ll have to if we want to really answer the question. Who else would be a good resource? Police? Shelter director? What does the general public perceive as the reasons behind homelessness? I was with Liz, and we decided to just go. Her good sense of direction and knowledge of districts of downtown Toronto came in very handy.
What an experience. We didn't want to offend the homeless person so how do you approach them? My ground rule was that I wasn't going to talk to anyone who was talking to themselves...so that ruled out our first potential interviewee... the next fellow was lingering near the edge of a street and I just took a deep breath and went right up to him and introduced myself. I knew that if I didn't just do it I would have chickened out. But then right as I began to speak I realized I had not really thought of what questions to ask. What came out of my mouth was me just running on adrenaline. Are you from Toronto? Is this your neighbourhood? Do you have friends around here? None of these would really lead me to the question about why the homeless are on the streets but hey as we walked away, we discussed the questions asked and refined them for the next attempt. So the next homeless person was a lady and we were able to talk more and ask more relevant questions. The final homeless interviewee was a man who flipped from French to English and I think he found it quite amusing that we were talking to him.

so to answer our question:
-Homeless: they are comfortable being homeless in Toronto. The general public is nice and no there isn't much they would change about their situation.
-General public: unemployment rates, low minimum wage, overpopulation...all reasons that exempt the people on the street of blame
-Police: stats show most of them end up there because of drug abuse problems and mental illness. The police went on to say that the public tends to side with the homeless people and offer compassion without knowing that they are either abusing the system or have prior criminal records or are just always high.

SO it was quite the difference in responses....we went back to the office and met up with the other girls who had had difference experiences talking to a shelter director and another fellow on the border of being homeless. The main causes definitely came down to substance abuse and mental illness...

Apart from the actual results of the question, it was the experience of realizing what you had to find in yourself to really get out there and do something you are not comfortable with. We discussed the exercise on the way back to the house and at this point I think the idea of being in a completely new environment was starting to sink in...in a positive, exciting kind of way.

Back at the house, we were to get a written assigment ready for the next day about MFPs (Multi-functional platforms) and an evaluation tool to take a project from one phase to the next. Personally I only began my assignment at about 1230am, I felt the need to really sort out what I had been experiencing in the last few days. I could feel my mindset shifting and learning and prioritizing. As I became more comfortable with the possibility of unknowns and culture differences, I could focus more on being excited and enthusiastic....the way I wanted to feel!
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