How to Facilitate a Conflict Resolution Workshop in Congo... or What to Avoid When Facilitating!
The Workshop
In 2008, my dear friend Jessie Robinson and I wrote a conflict resolution workshop as a final project in a course facilitated by Karen Ridd at the University of Winnipeg called Violence and Nonviolence. We were interested in writing a workshop that addressed specific needs of women who had experienced domestic violence at the hands of men in their lives; neither of us, as undergraduate students, had any expertise in trauma healing as such. Therefore, at Karen's advice and encouragement, we tailored our workshop to deal specifically with issues of the loss of power that women may feel as victims, and how they might be empowered once again. We facilitated the workshop in June of 2008 at Outreach, the Fort Garry Women’s Resource Centre’s satellite location, for six women and found that we had a great deal of success in offering the skills and tools that we did.
The day before I left for Congo, on a whim, I packed my facilitator’s manual. After being read by a few different people, I was asked to facilitate our workshop at a school in Sanga Mamba in Kinshasa for a group of young girls who are in the process of learning to become seamstresses. Additionally, I was asked to facilitate for their teachers during a separate session. My facilitations were arranged through Pasteur Ya Namwisi Mukambo, who is a member of the administrative board of the school.
The Students
With the group of girls, I was able to follow my facilitator’s manual relatively closely. Oh wait, did I mention that there were fifty-five girls participating?? Yes, that's right. 55. Actually, we did several head counts throughout the morning. We started with 37, and did another count twenty minutes later and had 46. 45 miutes later, I asked that we count again, and the result was 63 participants. I had to put my foot down. I really didn't want to deny anyone the opportunity to participate, but really. I'm just a kid from Winnipeg who wrote a workshop. Did I mention that I had only facilitated once before, with a partner and six participants? Right. So I cut them off at 55.
I started by attempting to do an icebreaker with them. The girls did, at first, have some difficulty understanding the instructions. When I attempted to move around the circle one by one, giving each participant a chance to play the game, the girls on either side of me feigned ignorance and claimed that they did not understand French (even after it had been explained to them in Lingala). There were however, enough participants who were bold enough to give the game a try. I ended up proceeding by letting them call out as they built up the courage to participate instead of going around the circle in order; with 55 participants in total, we ended up with enough bold participants to have some fun in the end. It wasn’t until about an hour after we had begun the session that morning that I realized that because the students are taught in rote, the concept of participatory learning must be unfamiliar to them. It would not make for a positive experience for any of them if I were to force each one to participate. Therefore, I carried out the rest of the workshop’s activities in the same manner as the first icebreaker in order to gently introduce this new concept.
After the first icebreaker, I did two brainstorming activities with the girls. The first brainstorm was in setting guidelines of behaviour on the rest of our time together that day, and the second was in identifying both negative and positive aspects of conflict. Upon reflection, I realize now that the brainstorm sessions themselves would have been put to much better use as icebreakers, as they slowly opened the participants’ minds to the idea that they could be free to speak their minds and that they already possessed valid knowledge.
After going over the five conflict styles with them – accommodation; avoidance; compromise; collaboration; and competition – I organized them into groups and asked them to come up with a two or three minute skit that exemplified a conflict and that made use of one or more of the five conflict styles in its resolution. This role play activity was by far the greatest success of the day. Whereas when Jessie and I facilitated our workshop for the women in Winnipeg and decided halfway through the morning not to include the role plays, here in Congo the opportunity for theatrics and drama was perfectly culturally appropriate. They were fantastic!
The girls got right into them, and all wanted to be the first group to present. We ended up drawing numbers from a jar. During each one, the whole audience also got involved; clapping and calling out to the 'actors' in response to occurrences in the skit. Their skits also gave me some invaluable insight into the types of conflicts that are common and most pressing in their lives. Very interestingly, three out of five groups presented skits that addressed common conflicts regarding cell phones. When I first arrived in Kinshasa and was given a cell phone to use during my stay here, I was warned against leaving it unattended anywhere or carrying it in a place that could be easily accessible to a pickpocket because it would be sure to go missing. Not only is theft a major issue, but so is cell phone credit; there are no land lines in Congo, and all plans work on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have tried to restrict the number of people that I’ve given my phone number out to, but still I get text messages and quick phone calls on a regular basis from people who have somehow come across my phone number and are asking me to recharge the credits on their phones (the assumption being that I, as a Westerner, have plenty of money to share). In fact, as I was writing just five minutes ago I got a phone call from one of the student participants in this workshop asking me to recharge her phone. Wireless communication can be a major issue of contention in many contexts here in Congo, and it can cause major rifts in relationships. The other two groups presented different issues. One group’s conflict was between a husband, his wife, and his mistress; he was treating his mistress better than his wife.
After the skits, we took a lunch break to snack on bread, roasted peanuts, and pop, and continued on after approximately a half hour. Although I did continue with the second and third sections of the workshop, I read through them quickly and left out all but one activity. The reasons for which I decided to leave out the parts I did are as follow:
First, the girls were getting restless. Even after taking a break and having something to eat, they had still begun itching to leave because each day of school here in Congo (and in much of Africa) only lasts for half a day. Second, after having spent the morning with them, upon reflection I had realized that because they do not live in an egalitarian culture and society, many of the issues concerning women’s empowerment that are addressed in the workshop do not transfer culturally. Further, I became mindful of the fact that I could potentially do more harm than good if I were to try to convince the young girls that they could independently control their decisions and their lives; an individualistic world view that does not exist as such here in Congo. Decisions need to be considered in terms of the ripple effects that they can have on various family and social groups. There are issues of face-saving and collective conflict resolution processes among parties to conflict that involve intermediaries that the material concerning empowerment in my workshop does not address. Because I have not done an adequate amount of research into this aspect of Congolese culture, I decided to dilute the empowerment messages in the latter part of the workshop. After outlining the seven-step conflict resolution process in the workshop for the participants, I finished with a simple empowerment activity whereby I asked the girls to finish the following phrase: “I feel powerful when…” I saw positive results with this activity and noticed several of the girls smiling and clapping for one another.
What worked and what was challenging
To my surprise the girls did incorporate the conflict styles into their skits. I was concerned that they might have difficulty with conceptualizing the application of the new information in a learning environment that was so different from what they are familiar with, but this was not the case. They did a great job of exemplifying the uses of the styles in conflict and moreover of incorporating them into their own contexts. This has given me a strong indication that there are aspects of conflict and how conflict is experienced that are universal.
However, not all of the workshop’s material proved to be universal. The participatory learning facilitation methods didn’t carry over to a rote education setting very smoothly. In fact, I don’t believe that the role of a facilitator as I understand it – as a person who fosters critical thinking and participants’ abilities to come to their own conclusions – is a role that these girls, at their age and level of experience with this type of workshop, are familiar with. By the end of the day, they had come around and seemed more comfortable with actively participating, but it was incredibly slow going during the first few hours. Further, the concept of women’s empowerment that I attempted to offer them did not transfer culturally. This message was shaped in my Western, egalitarian society. Here in Congo, I do not find an egalitarian society. I find a culturally embedded hierarchy of power in both social and familial roles. Both socioeconomic and political systems in Congo reproduce and reinforce this hierarchy. I had sensed, by the middle of my facilitation, that to push the empowerment message without a way to make it meaningful or relevant here in Congo could mean that the conflict resolution skills and material that we had spent the entire morning working on might end up being rendered obsolete to them. Therefore, I read quickly through the sections on power and only facilitated the empowerment activity with them at the end of the workshop.
Did I mention that there were 55 participants? I found that a little challenging.
The Teachers
With the teachers, our workshop was transformed in a way that it dealt only with styles of behaviour and communication in conflict. When I arrived in the morning, I had a moment of panic when I found that 28 out of 30 participants were men. It was not their gender in and of itself that made me panic – although I must admit that this, too, intimidated me – but it was the fact that I was about to facilitate a conflict resolution workshop written for women who’d experienced violence at the hands of men for men. I had to ask myself why I hadn’t thought of this before I agreed to do the session for the teachers. I should have known that it would be almost exclusively, if not entirely, men; I have experienced time and again since I arrived being the only woman in countless professional and/or academic settings. My session with the teachers was much shorter than that with the students. I only presented the first section of the workshop, covering just up to the final role play after having introduced the five conflict styles, and ended our session together right after the role plays had been discussed.
What worked and what was challenging
The brainstorming and the role play activity went over quite well. The teachers were much more active participants, which made my role as facilitator much easier when it came to generating and encouraging discussion in a language that I am still working at ameliorating. However, I did not touch on a key aspect of the workshop at all. Men do not experience power in the same way as women do. I was presenting this material in a hierarchical culture in which, contemporarily, men occupy the majority of the upper rungs of this order – which, I must add, is not to state that all men abuse their more powerful status. Because, in addition to their inherent power as men they also hold positions of authority as teachers, to give a workshop on conflict and power to this particular group would have entailed entirely different material. As I have not done research in depth into how men experience loss of power, I am simply unqualified to address these issues at this time.
Unfortunately, I ended the session rather abruptly when all three skits had been acted out and we had had brief discussions about the styles their skits exemplified. I kind of panicked and just said ok, we're done. Lol! Not my most shining moment. Had I had a chance to think it through, I might have adapted the material to my audience and facilitated a more well-rounded, albeit shorter, session. Or, frankly, I may have declined to facilitate my workshop for women for a group of men. But because I hadn’t had any of this foresight, I found myself at a loss and as a result left the participants feeling as though the workshop was incomplete. Oops.
Overall these two facilitations have proved to be incredible learning experiences for me. They were opportunities for me to step outside of my role as observer in this new country and culture and engage directly in a different role. One of the learning goals I had set for my practicum was to determine whether any of the theory and practical application of conflict resolution principles I have studied to date are transferrable outside of the Western context in which I have studied them. I feel that I can conclude that to a certain degree, the fundamentals of behaviour and communication are, in fact, transferrable. I was able to observe this concretely in the ways that all of the participants from both groups asked questions while I presented the theory and then applied the theory in their role plays through conflict situations that are relevant and real in their own lives. This was truly fascinating for me.
I also feel that I have a much deeper and more tangible appreciation of the importance of having a rich understanding of both broader socio-cultural issues, and deeper cultural nuances before preparing to do any kind of cross-cultural training. I was prepared with some of this knowledge given my extensive research into Congo’s history and contemporary social conditions. This work was validated for me after my session with the students. Upon a short debriefing in Pasteur Mukambo’s office, he informed me that one of the participants sitting next to him – who had avoided directly participating in any of the activities – had nonetheless listened intently during all of our time together and had at one point whispered to her friend that the things I was talking about were what they live every day. This gave me an incredible sense of relief and satisfaction. However, had I taken into consideration some of the social details such as their rote education setting or some of the broader cultural realities such as the social hierarchy of power, I believe that I may have had more success in getting the messages of empowerment in our workshop across to the participants. This will be invaluable knowledge in the future.
Like I said in my last post, I'm just a kid from Winnipeg. If you had told me that I'd be doing this sort of thing here I would have slapped you on the back and said 'I didn't know you were funny!'
The Workshop
In 2008, my dear friend Jessie Robinson and I wrote a conflict resolution workshop as a final project in a course facilitated by Karen Ridd at the University of Winnipeg called Violence and Nonviolence. We were interested in writing a workshop that addressed specific needs of women who had experienced domestic violence at the hands of men in their lives; neither of us, as undergraduate students, had any expertise in trauma healing as such. Therefore, at Karen's advice and encouragement, we tailored our workshop to deal specifically with issues of the loss of power that women may feel as victims, and how they might be empowered once again. We facilitated the workshop in June of 2008 at Outreach, the Fort Garry Women’s Resource Centre’s satellite location, for six women and found that we had a great deal of success in offering the skills and tools that we did.
The day before I left for Congo, on a whim, I packed my facilitator’s manual. After being read by a few different people, I was asked to facilitate our workshop at a school in Sanga Mamba in Kinshasa for a group of young girls who are in the process of learning to become seamstresses. Additionally, I was asked to facilitate for their teachers during a separate session. My facilitations were arranged through Pasteur Ya Namwisi Mukambo, who is a member of the administrative board of the school.
The Students
With the group of girls, I was able to follow my facilitator’s manual relatively closely. Oh wait, did I mention that there were fifty-five girls participating?? Yes, that's right. 55. Actually, we did several head counts throughout the morning. We started with 37, and did another count twenty minutes later and had 46. 45 miutes later, I asked that we count again, and the result was 63 participants. I had to put my foot down. I really didn't want to deny anyone the opportunity to participate, but really. I'm just a kid from Winnipeg who wrote a workshop. Did I mention that I had only facilitated once before, with a partner and six participants? Right. So I cut them off at 55.
I started by attempting to do an icebreaker with them. The girls did, at first, have some difficulty understanding the instructions. When I attempted to move around the circle one by one, giving each participant a chance to play the game, the girls on either side of me feigned ignorance and claimed that they did not understand French (even after it had been explained to them in Lingala). There were however, enough participants who were bold enough to give the game a try. I ended up proceeding by letting them call out as they built up the courage to participate instead of going around the circle in order; with 55 participants in total, we ended up with enough bold participants to have some fun in the end. It wasn’t until about an hour after we had begun the session that morning that I realized that because the students are taught in rote, the concept of participatory learning must be unfamiliar to them. It would not make for a positive experience for any of them if I were to force each one to participate. Therefore, I carried out the rest of the workshop’s activities in the same manner as the first icebreaker in order to gently introduce this new concept.After the first icebreaker, I did two brainstorming activities with the girls. The first brainstorm was in setting guidelines of behaviour on the rest of our time together that day, and the second was in identifying both negative and positive aspects of conflict. Upon reflection, I realize now that the brainstorm sessions themselves would have been put to much better use as icebreakers, as they slowly opened the participants’ minds to the idea that they could be free to speak their minds and that they already possessed valid knowledge.
After going over the five conflict styles with them – accommodation; avoidance; compromise; collaboration; and competition – I organized them into groups and asked them to come up with a two or three minute skit that exemplified a conflict and that made use of one or more of the five conflict styles in its resolution. This role play activity was by far the greatest success of the day. Whereas when Jessie and I facilitated our workshop for the women in Winnipeg and decided halfway through the morning not to include the role plays, here in Congo the opportunity for theatrics and drama was perfectly culturally appropriate. They were fantastic!
The girls got right into them, and all wanted to be the first group to present. We ended up drawing numbers from a jar. During each one, the whole audience also got involved; clapping and calling out to the 'actors' in response to occurrences in the skit. Their skits also gave me some invaluable insight into the types of conflicts that are common and most pressing in their lives. Very interestingly, three out of five groups presented skits that addressed common conflicts regarding cell phones. When I first arrived in Kinshasa and was given a cell phone to use during my stay here, I was warned against leaving it unattended anywhere or carrying it in a place that could be easily accessible to a pickpocket because it would be sure to go missing. Not only is theft a major issue, but so is cell phone credit; there are no land lines in Congo, and all plans work on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have tried to restrict the number of people that I’ve given my phone number out to, but still I get text messages and quick phone calls on a regular basis from people who have somehow come across my phone number and are asking me to recharge the credits on their phones (the assumption being that I, as a Westerner, have plenty of money to share). In fact, as I was writing just five minutes ago I got a phone call from one of the student participants in this workshop asking me to recharge her phone. Wireless communication can be a major issue of contention in many contexts here in Congo, and it can cause major rifts in relationships. The other two groups presented different issues. One group’s conflict was between a husband, his wife, and his mistress; he was treating his mistress better than his wife.After the skits, we took a lunch break to snack on bread, roasted peanuts, and pop, and continued on after approximately a half hour. Although I did continue with the second and third sections of the workshop, I read through them quickly and left out all but one activity. The reasons for which I decided to leave out the parts I did are as follow:
First, the girls were getting restless. Even after taking a break and having something to eat, they had still begun itching to leave because each day of school here in Congo (and in much of Africa) only lasts for half a day. Second, after having spent the morning with them, upon reflection I had realized that because they do not live in an egalitarian culture and society, many of the issues concerning women’s empowerment that are addressed in the workshop do not transfer culturally. Further, I became mindful of the fact that I could potentially do more harm than good if I were to try to convince the young girls that they could independently control their decisions and their lives; an individualistic world view that does not exist as such here in Congo. Decisions need to be considered in terms of the ripple effects that they can have on various family and social groups. There are issues of face-saving and collective conflict resolution processes among parties to conflict that involve intermediaries that the material concerning empowerment in my workshop does not address. Because I have not done an adequate amount of research into this aspect of Congolese culture, I decided to dilute the empowerment messages in the latter part of the workshop. After outlining the seven-step conflict resolution process in the workshop for the participants, I finished with a simple empowerment activity whereby I asked the girls to finish the following phrase: “I feel powerful when…” I saw positive results with this activity and noticed several of the girls smiling and clapping for one another.
What worked and what was challenging
To my surprise the girls did incorporate the conflict styles into their skits. I was concerned that they might have difficulty with conceptualizing the application of the new information in a learning environment that was so different from what they are familiar with, but this was not the case. They did a great job of exemplifying the uses of the styles in conflict and moreover of incorporating them into their own contexts. This has given me a strong indication that there are aspects of conflict and how conflict is experienced that are universal.
However, not all of the workshop’s material proved to be universal. The participatory learning facilitation methods didn’t carry over to a rote education setting very smoothly. In fact, I don’t believe that the role of a facilitator as I understand it – as a person who fosters critical thinking and participants’ abilities to come to their own conclusions – is a role that these girls, at their age and level of experience with this type of workshop, are familiar with. By the end of the day, they had come around and seemed more comfortable with actively participating, but it was incredibly slow going during the first few hours. Further, the concept of women’s empowerment that I attempted to offer them did not transfer culturally. This message was shaped in my Western, egalitarian society. Here in Congo, I do not find an egalitarian society. I find a culturally embedded hierarchy of power in both social and familial roles. Both socioeconomic and political systems in Congo reproduce and reinforce this hierarchy. I had sensed, by the middle of my facilitation, that to push the empowerment message without a way to make it meaningful or relevant here in Congo could mean that the conflict resolution skills and material that we had spent the entire morning working on might end up being rendered obsolete to them. Therefore, I read quickly through the sections on power and only facilitated the empowerment activity with them at the end of the workshop.
Did I mention that there were 55 participants? I found that a little challenging.
The Teachers
With the teachers, our workshop was transformed in a way that it dealt only with styles of behaviour and communication in conflict. When I arrived in the morning, I had a moment of panic when I found that 28 out of 30 participants were men. It was not their gender in and of itself that made me panic – although I must admit that this, too, intimidated me – but it was the fact that I was about to facilitate a conflict resolution workshop written for women who’d experienced violence at the hands of men for men. I had to ask myself why I hadn’t thought of this before I agreed to do the session for the teachers. I should have known that it would be almost exclusively, if not entirely, men; I have experienced time and again since I arrived being the only woman in countless professional and/or academic settings. My session with the teachers was much shorter than that with the students. I only presented the first section of the workshop, covering just up to the final role play after having introduced the five conflict styles, and ended our session together right after the role plays had been discussed.
What worked and what was challenging
The brainstorming and the role play activity went over quite well. The teachers were much more active participants, which made my role as facilitator much easier when it came to generating and encouraging discussion in a language that I am still working at ameliorating. However, I did not touch on a key aspect of the workshop at all. Men do not experience power in the same way as women do. I was presenting this material in a hierarchical culture in which, contemporarily, men occupy the majority of the upper rungs of this order – which, I must add, is not to state that all men abuse their more powerful status. Because, in addition to their inherent power as men they also hold positions of authority as teachers, to give a workshop on conflict and power to this particular group would have entailed entirely different material. As I have not done research in depth into how men experience loss of power, I am simply unqualified to address these issues at this time.
Unfortunately, I ended the session rather abruptly when all three skits had been acted out and we had had brief discussions about the styles their skits exemplified. I kind of panicked and just said ok, we're done. Lol! Not my most shining moment. Had I had a chance to think it through, I might have adapted the material to my audience and facilitated a more well-rounded, albeit shorter, session. Or, frankly, I may have declined to facilitate my workshop for women for a group of men. But because I hadn’t had any of this foresight, I found myself at a loss and as a result left the participants feeling as though the workshop was incomplete. Oops.
Overall these two facilitations have proved to be incredible learning experiences for me. They were opportunities for me to step outside of my role as observer in this new country and culture and engage directly in a different role. One of the learning goals I had set for my practicum was to determine whether any of the theory and practical application of conflict resolution principles I have studied to date are transferrable outside of the Western context in which I have studied them. I feel that I can conclude that to a certain degree, the fundamentals of behaviour and communication are, in fact, transferrable. I was able to observe this concretely in the ways that all of the participants from both groups asked questions while I presented the theory and then applied the theory in their role plays through conflict situations that are relevant and real in their own lives. This was truly fascinating for me.
I also feel that I have a much deeper and more tangible appreciation of the importance of having a rich understanding of both broader socio-cultural issues, and deeper cultural nuances before preparing to do any kind of cross-cultural training. I was prepared with some of this knowledge given my extensive research into Congo’s history and contemporary social conditions. This work was validated for me after my session with the students. Upon a short debriefing in Pasteur Mukambo’s office, he informed me that one of the participants sitting next to him – who had avoided directly participating in any of the activities – had nonetheless listened intently during all of our time together and had at one point whispered to her friend that the things I was talking about were what they live every day. This gave me an incredible sense of relief and satisfaction. However, had I taken into consideration some of the social details such as their rote education setting or some of the broader cultural realities such as the social hierarchy of power, I believe that I may have had more success in getting the messages of empowerment in our workshop across to the participants. This will be invaluable knowledge in the future.
Like I said in my last post, I'm just a kid from Winnipeg. If you had told me that I'd be doing this sort of thing here I would have slapped you on the back and said 'I didn't know you were funny!'
Oh sweetie It is amazing so many things we western women take for granted. Hugs to you and your families.
ReplyDeleteoh and since you are coming homes soon. I want to remind you to bump up the Congo economy by buying me some wonderful fabric. LOL .
ReplyDelete