Despite the serious problems in the program’s design, we had some wonderful experiences in villages and parishes. Rural folk were hun- gry for the chance to tell their stories and share their feelings about
local issues. They wanted to know how to be honest neighbors, how to manage small projects effectively to bring in needed money and resources, how to communicate better among themselves. There was safety enough in some situations for people to be very honest indeed.
When asked what they most wanted to learn, villagers invari- ably replied “kusikilizana.” This Swahili word means to hear one another. Most of these villagers were preliterate. If they were in their thirties or forties, they had not had occasion to go to primary school in their village. We could not use charts with Swahili words on them, so we used many large line or stick drawings or found ob- jects or representative colors. Village leaders had a great sense of the symbolic and could immediately relate to selecting a piece of colored cloth that represented the economic state of their village.
“Green and red: there is a new harvest coming, showing green, but we don’t know how much we will get at the market for it, so I also choose red for my anger at the low prices!” “Brown for the soil: we are farmers with our fingers in the earth.” They clearly felt safe in speaking their minds and hearts to one another.
Listening to the themes of a community in a listening survey by living there and being with the people demanded more Swahili skills than we two Americans possessed. In the villages where he was accepted Makame could listen and reflect back to the people and to us what he had heard. In other villages, his being a Muslim made it unsafe for him to be present in the community. Some of the parish leaders went to the bishop to complain that a Muslim was coming to teach them. We soon discovered how uncomfortable it is not to have the safety needed for learners to learn or teachers to teach.
In one village in Musoma where we had been invited to teach the local leaders communications and management skills, we discovered an appalling polarization between the men and women. Men simply had no time for the women leaders, who had been elected by their peers. The men refused to listen to women when they spoke during the course. When women’s groups made their reports, the men would
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talk to one another. One old man in particular, Amos, was impa- tient with our approach when we insisted on their listening more carefully to the women members.
“Let us get on with the seminar,” he said at one point. “She is just wasting our time. After all, she is only a woman.” These same men could speak very warmly about democracy and equality as po- litical party leaders and Christian teachers. Apparently they were not aware of the incongruity of their attitude toward their mothers, wives, and daughters.
If we had been using monologue, we would have given them a stirring lecture in carefully chosen language about ujamaa,the na- tional theme of familyhood and respect for all. We would have in- vited their questions and gone home feeling justified in the quality of our teaching. We were trying to use dialogue, however, and all the principles and practices of adult learning that were emerging from our work. So we took a chance by using a simulated situation to catch the attention of men and women alike. I felt entirely safe doing this simple drama, trusting the Tanzanian women to come up with some way to save the situation.
The simulation began when my colleague, as planned, entered the round, thatched hut where the village course was being held.
She was rather agitated and asked to meet all the women in the middle of the room. The men sat quietly around the walls, won- dering. The teacher explained, in a concerned voice, that a child of the village had fallen into a large pit and it was impossible to get him out. He was a tiny lad of four and was terrified in the dark hole.
What could be done? Outside we could hear the distant wailing of a child: Makame was providing sound effects.
The first response from the women was: “Let us call the men!”
“No use!” replied the teacher. “All of the men have gone into town to watch a football game. There are no men in the village at this time.” “Then let us go and call them from town!” “No, there is not enough time. The child is very frightened. We have to do some- thing immediately.” Makame, outside, wailed louder. The village women entered the role play with great gusto, making various sug-
gestions, almost all of them indicating their dependency on the men. The village men sat by and chuckled in delight at the drama.
“We can find a ladder at the carpenter’s shop.” The wailing contin- ued. “We can search for a long rope! The fishermen have one!” “We can go to the next village and call their men!” Then one of the women, in a very small voice, said: “We could use our kangas (shawls) and make a rope!” “Yes, we could tie all of our kangas to- gether and make a rope long enough to pull him out of the pit!”
More wailing!
With great glee, the village women whipped off their individual shawls, made of sturdy cotton, and began with feverish haste to tie them together, forming a long rope that was thrown out the door of the hut. A great cheer arose, from men and women alike in the hut, when we pulled in the frightened, lost child (a smiling, silent Makame).
In immediate reflection upon the activity, as the women laugh- ingly recovered their kangas, we began with an open question:
“What happened here?” One woman responded: “We discovered a way for ourselves, without the men! We used our own resources!
We made it work! We worked together!” Then the teacher asked:
“Whose idea was it to use the kangas?” One woman replied: “It was Maria’s idea, but she had only one kanga!”
The next morning, old Amos came to me grumbling: “You! Last night, I could not sleep thinking of those women and their kangas!”
The women had taught the men something very important, and they had taught themselves something even more important. Our job was to design and present the task, the simulation, in a safe, structured environment and invite their wise response. The envi- ronment of safety in that hut evoked their spontaneous creativity, collaboration, and communication.
Evaluation
Months afterward I happened to visit that village, and the women, seeing me, called out laughing, “We remember the kangas!” The safety we felt in that community had permitted us to deal with a
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sensitive problem through that simulation.There was no immediate indication of change in the men’s relation to the women. This prob- lem was so deep-seated in the culture that we and our CED program could do nothing further about it. But the women had made a safe beginning. One old man’s sleep was disturbed by this new concept.
That might be the only possible indicator of success.
Ultimately, the suspicions that billowed around Makame made it impossible for him to continue working with us. His two-year con- tract with CUSO was continued through other development en- terprises. The political, economic, cultural, and historical forces in that Christian community never really made it safe enough to in- clude him in the program. We learned a hard lesson about program development: community organizing, assiduous preparation, per- sonal contacts with key individuals and groups in a community are all necessary to establish a safe environment for community educa- tion. Even then, the issues facing a community often have such deep cultural roots that building awareness on certain issues may be unacceptable or unsafe.
Perhaps adult learning is always dangerous. A fifty-year-old woman in one of our programs in North Carolina, investigating a welcoming undergraduate program for women at a small southern college, told the admissions officer: “My husband says he is glad for me to go back to school, as long as I do not change!” It was not safe for the husband to have his wife in college. As I look back on this Tanzanian program, I think of Donald Oliver’s brilliant distinction between technical and ontological knowledge: “Technical knowl- edge refers to adaptive, publicly transferable information or skills;
ontological knowing refers to a more diffuse apprehension of real- ity, in the nature of liturgical or artistic engagement. In this latter sense, we come to know with our whole body, as it participates in the creation of significant new occasions—occasions which move from imagination and intention to critical self-definition to satis- faction and finally to perishing and new being” (1989, p. 63).
Do you hear the quantum themes in Oliver’s statement? I am aware that in our small, precarious community education program
in Musoma, Tanzania, we were dealing almost all the time with problems of ontological knowing. I have learned much from that experience but mostly that safety in the learning situation, for teacher and learner, is even more necessary when we are facing the complex challenges involved in advancing learning in a cross- cultural situation.
Today in Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, the president, has taken on the challenge of dealing directly with “corruption and sleaze among leaders” (http:www.Tanzania). Community education for de- velopment is still called for in that struggling nation. Safety is a global concept. In the macro-economic environment of globaliza- tion, Julius Nyerere’s description is important: “Globalization is like a boxing match, where a huge professional boxer faces a small am- ateur, and the umpire disappears.” How can education and eco- nomics build safety into the picture of global development? This question is even more vital in today’s world.
Design Challenges
• In your own teaching and learning situations with adults or others, how do you see safety as a variable you can control and assure? What can you do to make sure it is available to you as teacher and to the learners?
• What do you discern in this story as our worst move?
That is, what seemed to lead most directly to a loss of safety and the loss of Makame’s services in the develop- ment education program?
• Why do you think the Swahili proverb—Kupotea njia ndiko kujua njia!“By losing the way one learns the way!”—is relevant here?
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his chapter examines a situation where the relationship between the instructor and the learner was clearly an important factor in the learning process. I call this principle sound relationship—which implies that there is friendship but no dependency, fun with- out trivializing learning, dialogue between adult men and women who feel themselves peers. It has roots in quantum theory. Listen to Margaret Wheatley: “In the quantum world, relationship is the key determiner of everything. Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent ‘things.’ Quantum physics paints a strange yet enticing view of a world that, as Heisenberg describes it, ‘appears as a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby deter- mine the texture of the whole’ (1958, p. 107.) These unseen con- nections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation” (Wheatley, 1999, p. 11).
In Chapter One you examined the power of sound relationships in enhancing adults’ potential for learning. Sound relationships for learning involve respect, safety, open communication, listening, and humility. The quantum concepts of energy and the relatedness of all things are at work here. Learners’ energy is much more available when they trust their teacher and are trusted in a learning situation.