First Community Meeting

I have been pretty lazy with writing mostly because I have not been up to anything too exciting. On the 15th I held my first community meeting. This was held in the small village that I will be focusing most of my efforts. I have learned from other volunteers that things will not and do not go as planned. So I went into this knowing that it was the first thing that I put together as a PCV and I have never done a community meeting before. I figured it would most certainly have something go wrong. To start with I got a phone call saying that the individual who was going to translate for me was not where he was to be picked up. So my counterpart left him so that we would not be late. The meeting started at 8:30 and I was not picked up until about 8:20. You all know me and how much I hate to be late to important things. My counterpart and I show up at the meeting at about 8:35 and there is a sign on the fence that says the community meeting has been moved.

Great, the people who are hosting the meeting have no idea where it was. You would think that we would have been the first ones to find out! So eventually we got to the right place and the only people there were the ones who were helping set things up. I have mentioned African/Zulu Land time and how everyone is late and boy is it accurate. We finally decided to start around 9:30 when we had about 35 people. Eventually more came and we ended up with almost 50 people in attendance. I have been learning a lot about Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA.) This is an analysis tool that allows the community to determine its own needs and wants and it is what I based my meeting plan on. I broke the group up into groups of men and women. Then I would be able to see the needs of each gender group and compare them. It was very interesting to see the difference in their needs. For example the men’s group (which was composed mostly of younger boys my age) mainly wanted a new sports ground. Whereas the women’s group (Gogos and middle aged women) really wanted a crèche and a clinic. I would have been interested to see if the needs for the men’s group would have been different had it been an older percentage of men. Our meeting went for about 45 minutes and overall it went pretty well. I heard that people showed up for the meeting as late as 12:00. This is still so crazy to me to understand! I was able to get a great feeling for some of the community members and I look forward to working with them.