OH trip in the Malila language area

On Tuesday 28^th March, I travelled to the Malila language area, together with Frank. We met with Majaliwa in the village of Iyunga Mapinduzi, where we had planned to hold our first meeting. The last stretch of road was rather slippery after the previous day’s rain but we arrived safely. There we met with a group of seven people, from a couple of different churches, all of whom had connected with our project in one way or another, though primarily through having attended workshops.

We followed the same format that we followed during our initial field trip to the village of Jojo: we started with a Bible study on John 15 (using the Malila Scriptures, with participants taking it in turns to read the verses, and with most of the discussion taking place in Malila), then explained more about why we were visiting, asked for permission to write their stories and share them, told an example story (it’s important to have a really good one, with clear dates, people and change) and then invited them to share. To help prompt stories relating to different aspects of what our project has done in the area, we had prepared a ‘map’ of resources and activities that our project has created and done in the past, which we spread out in the middle of the circle.

I’m not sure how much this map helped, but it was at least a prompt for us, as the facilitators, in drawing out stories. We also had our list of ‘progress markers’ we could refer to, to see if we were hearing about the kinds of changes we were hoping to see. This came in more useful when we looked at the stories later, to see whether we were hearing what we had hoped for – it was encouraging to find a good number of the progress markers in evidence in the stories we had collected.

We spent about 3 hours with the group: 10 minutes of introductions, 50-60 minutes on the Bible study, 15 minutes of explanation, and then over an hour and a half of listening to their stories. We gave everyone a little money for food (though I’m sure most people kept it for household needs), as a way of saying thank you for their time.

Image: Bible study on John 15

On arriving at Majaliwa’s house, where Frank and I were staying, we started to turn our scribbled notes into Outcome Statements. We wrote them out in Swahili (our shared language of communication) on A6 pieces of paper, noting the ‘Contribution’ for each one (which we had been careful to probe for during the meeting). I then typed them up into our database, in English. The next morning we spent half an hour or so considering the ‘Significance’ of the different statements (see picture).

We repeated this process on Wednesday in the village of Shinzingo. This village was chosen because we haven’t done much work there, so it may give us a chance to compare the difference in places where there has been a lot of input versus very little. Most of the stories were quite dated, due to lack of recent input, which in itself was a finding, highlighting that SIL’s input does make a difference. It requires more than just one or two people from a village going to one workshop at some point, instead regular input of different kinds leads to much greater fruit. Despite that, there was some encouraging stories. We were kindly invited to the host church pastor’s home for a lunch of rice and chicken (classic food for guests).

We repeated the process again on Thursday in the village of Ilembo, which is the main village for the Malila language area, and where we have done a lot of work over the years. Contrary to expectation, we struggled to get many stories out of the group, despite the varied ways they have been involved and the fact that two of them are members of the newly formed Malila NGO (set up to continue where SIL left off). Not sure why, maybe to do with the personalities of the people present.

On Friday morning we also began to do a bit of sense-making by looking at actors. In the process we realised another useful sense-making activity would be to look at those who had been reached. E.g. The main actor may have been a pastor, while those who were reached may be the elderly.

Initial counts suggested (for main actors):

• Church leaders: 16
• Transition literacy teachers: 9
• Group leaders in churches: 4
• Community:4
• Basic literacy teachers: 3
• NGO: 3
• SIL: 3
• Churches: 3
• Choir/song writers: 2
• Sunday school teachers: 1

From Friday afternoon onwards, we moved into ministry, teaching a Bible seminar on Galatians at a church in the village of Santilya, using the Malila Scriptures, as requested by a pastor during the initial Malila field trip.

Challenges

• Need to allow 3 hours for the meetings (plus waiting time for everyone to arrive, as we always started much later than we were supposed to start).
• Really hard to get specific stories and recent stories. A lot of people harked back to when they had attended workshops many years ago and what they had done immediately after that, though some of those things had been kept up and are still continuing now.
• Hard to get clear examples of change, rather than just ‘they wanted to listen’ or ‘they understood better’ etc.
• We intentionally kept the groups small, but I think a larger group of up to 10 people may have produced more stories, without being too big.
• I had hoped we could have visited church groups in the afternoon, as an opportunity to distribute books or listen to audio Scriptures with people, but that proved impractical for various reasons (e.g. needing to leave in case it rained further and the road got worse or because we finished too late to attend a meeting etc.)
• Challenging to gather stories that reveal actors beyond those directly influenced by SIL. Most people we talked to had attended workshops etc. Harder to get stories of people further down the chain, who have been impacted by those who have been impacted directly by SIL, to show evidence of things gathering momentum and spreading.

Author: Katherine O'Donnell