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“If they would cry you would also cry in front of a child, but slowly slowly you resist it but if you resist it you will be having something in…For yourself, that problems that you have been listening to all day, it really remains in your brain” Picture of psycho-social support project googled from USAid
A gorgeous gift in my email this morning from Steph Colton, whose presence I sorely miss as we are moving towards what feels like real breakthroughs on several fronts. She sent me Developments 40, A special World Bank Report on whether the 2015 Millennium goals are being reached. I’ve attached it here. Page 19- 20 talks of testimony gathered by Panos
These life stories were gathered by the Panos network and patners using a painstaking method of interviewing which emphasises patient listening and openended questions.The result was that those journalists are now more inclined to highlight the problems faced by the people they met and others like them. These interviews were gathered using a method known as ‘oral testimony’, which sets out to record the fine detail of the lives of people in developing countries.
Olivia Bennett, a historian who pioneered this work says:
It seemed to me that while experts had written much research of value, there was a gap.We did not understand the complexities of why people made some of the choices they did.” she says. “Furthermore, development interventions tended to be based around sectors, such as health and education but there are no such neat divisions in peoples’ lives.”
Panos seems to have very similar intentions to Sparknow in it’s work with testimony:
A few years back, Steph and I wrote a paper called Gritty lessons and pearls of wisdom: using oral history interviews to draw deep insights from past action, illuminate heritage and catalyse learning (clearly I’ve still some way to go with snappy titling). It talks of our first serious attempts to draw out deep insight and render this into new patterns of surprising insight & perspective. In fact it was this work which has led to our narrative enquiry method. I miss the longer, fatter oral history interviews though. The power of the personal can bring the listener/reader into entirely new places. One set of interviews involved senior men at a development bank. We were looking, through listening to them, for what values the history of the bank held that needed to be passed on to, and live in, new generations of leaders:
“In 1984, Africa had just experienced an extremely serious drought in sub-Saharan Africa. The President had sent me on a mission. I went to Mali and Niger, concerning something else. It was there I discovered the damage that the drought had created. Farmers had nothing left to eat. The backwaters had dried up. Cattle were dying and I returned with these images in my head. I presented a report to the President during a meeting of the Operations Committee. He said to me, ‘Can you write for me what you have just written.’ I drew up a report on the drought in these countries. And he said to me, ‘I am going to conduct a mission to see this with my own eyes.’ He went on an extremely special assignment. He went to Ouagadougou, from Ouagadougou, he took the road to Dakar… by car, through areas where there were no asphalt roads. He took a car and he crossed Africa by car… Three to four thousand kilometres. He prepared a first aid kit, asked the official to bring a camera, and crossed Africa. When he arrived back, he said to me, “we will ask the Board of Management to create a special fund for the Sahel.
The lesson to draw out is that an institution of this nature cannot be managed by staying in the office. The office is extremely pleasant, we have air conditioning, etc… it is great but you need something more. You need to go out and see for yourself. You need to go out and you need to be able to listen. When you have seen and you have listened, you have to do something about it.”
What Panos/the World Bank say about changing the interviewers is also true. Steph and I did a knowledge management report for a CSR Foundation, looking at their investment in psycho-social support and other projects in Africa as a way to review what the CSR Foundation should seek to have as a knowledge management framework. Our client gathered testimony which we analysed. One interview, 19 minutes long, that I listened to and annotated, has never left me. A young girl, both parents dead, talked of her role in the psycho-social support programme, a young orphan leading other young orphans. She talked of the impact on her of such work:
“If they would cry you would also cry in front of a child, but slowly slowly you resist it but if you resist it you will be having something in…For yourself, that problems that you have been listening to all day, it really remains in your brain”
She was proud and happy to do such work with a cluster of perhaps 100 – 200 orphaned children because
“I also passed the same way they are passing”
I often think of her. I’d like to use her name, which is very beautiful and symbolic, but something stops me from sharing it with you, even though you and she would never meet. Something about the power of your own name? I don’t know why.
There’s a danger in such work of soundbite stories, a search for drama rather than a careful attention to the apparently ordinary. There’s also a real danger of rehearsed story. The farmers, say, who know just what the World Bank and Aid Agencies are looking for and wheel out the stories they want to have heard not the ones that really need to be told. That’s why I like our labour of narrative researchers working together, in painstaking ways, to sift materials and regroup them to find the truly representative small stories that will be a window onto a big subject.
What a glorious gift for a Saturday morning. It leads me to end with some Lewis Hyde from The Gift, which is quite simply the best book about what I’m trying to do in this work that I’ve read for years. One thing he says (p.18 my edition), is that in Maori hunting rituals there are three gifts. The forest gives the hunters a gift, the hunters give a portion of the kill to the priests, who in turn cook the birds at a sacred fire. This ceremony is called ‘whangai hau’ which means ‘nourishing hau’. The addition of the third party keeps the spirit of the gift alive. Without motion, the gift will be lost. However, he goes on to say (p.23) if a commodity moves for profit, ‘where does the gift move? The gift moves towards an empty place.’ Here is the nub of an intractable tension in the transfer of knowledge and inspiration. How to hold onto the essence of gift, that ineffable part of a piece of work that cannot be controlled or owned, and is essential both for the giver and for the receiver if our work is to do work? This troubles me enormously and has taken me entirely into a place I was looking at when I started this blog.
So, Stephanie’s gift has flowed from her to me, and I, in turn, am passing it on. And perhaps I’ll end on a quote from ‘Dangerous Angels’ by Francesca Lia Block, which, for me, makes the listening to the story the first step in a circle of gift exchange.
“Think about the word destroy’ the man said. ‘Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see? And restore… that’s re-story. Do you know that only two things that have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.”
Have good weekends all. Roger Deakin can wait until tomorrow.
