dear raffi, i have done a fair amount of work with a group of women who are victims of rape by military during the coup d'etat 91-94. they have suffered other violence as well, either directly or to family members.
you wrote: They attend a regular psychosocial rehabilitation group to deal with the pain, sorrow they carry. are the members of this group mentioned above, the same people who are coming to your open space gathering? seems like this is important. how often do the meet? are they living close to one another? is it in a refugee camp? i was invited by an international law firm to help the women i mentioned above, to become more organized in hopes of bringing their perpetratrors to justice or toward the victims obtaining reparation. like you, i have been dealing with a concrete objective apart from addressing their trauma and pain. nevertheless, the trauma and pain is all part of it. over and over again, i would hear the women say things like, "if it had not been for this group and one another, i would have lost my sanity and ended up living on the streets as an animal." like the women you are dealing with, they are desperately poor and are dealing with hardships that i cannot begin to imagine. with regard to my work with these women, i have more questions than answers. it is so clear that the women i am working with find great strength and encouragement when they come together. because of family obligations and financial constraints, they are not able to come together more than once or twice a month. another issue for me is that, while i speak haitian creole-their mother tongue-fluently, i am not a woman or a haitian. thus, there are numerous 'lines' that keep us from easily identifying with each other. good news for me is that the law firm hired one of my haitian colleagues, an experienced open space practitioner, to work with them and other victims groups on a regular basis. do all the women you are working with know how to read and write? if not, would be a good idea to adapt the open space so that non-readers don't feel the least bit intimidated. in terms of exercises around creativity and things like that, i have always avoided them. i am a bit of a purist with open space in general. when it comes to working with people who have suffered things that are totally outside of my experience, and people who don't have near the privilege that i have, i just try to humble myself before them, honoring them by simply holding space so that they can address what they feel needs to be addressed. have the women exerienced open space already? if they have not and if they do not have habits of getting together to address their specific objective of trying to find self-employment opportunities, i would just do the open space with them. if they come up with something clear that involves small business people and ngo directors, organize another meeting. but follow their clear and collective initiative instead of the opposite extreme of carrying out yours (by doing an open space meeting) and inviting them along with others. also, for what its worth, i attended monthly meetings with the group that i was working with for about 5 months before proposing anything to them. they would meet for normally two hours at a time to address various things and i was just an observer. i requested approaching it in this way. usually at the end of meetings they would invite me to share any reflections. don't know if this is helpful or not. forgive me if i have rambled. john http://www.beyondborders.net/experiment.htm _________________________________________________________________ MSN Search, le moteur de recherche qui pense comme vous ! http://search.msn.fr/worldwide.asp * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
