Special Event
Questions and Answers
Have you had any problems with your activities?
When we have a workshop on communication, we have had problems with certain politicians that don't want us working in that area. Because when we are talking of empowering people, you are asking them to raise their voices. You are teaching them to ask questions. Fortunately the right questions. Hopefully they ask the right questions. But sometimes it is not very comfortable to people who make use of controlling people's silence. Those sort of problems have been dealt with. Basically it is asking people to realize our rights in terms of an individual. How do we go about planning? And when we talk about planning, about aspirations of the community, then we have different target groups in terms of stakeholders. We don't just have the whole village together. We speak with maybe the poorest families of village because the poor are most comfortable amongst the poor. Then we speak with the teachers' group, students' groups, women's group, farmers' group, weavers' group etc. So we start with that and within their peer groups, they are more open. Then we try to integrate that slowly, slowly into the bigger picture. That is how the voice comes out. For example, for some woman or man, just coming to a meeting like for example this morning when we had the introductions and I asked you to give your name. But in many communities, that is very, very alienating. People don't speak in the meetings. So to have a woman a standing up in front of the whole village community and not speaking something so important but just saying her name, this is the first time in her life that she has had the opportunity to stand up and say something in front of the whole village. And that is something that is so empowering for them. You know it may not seem big for us but these little mechanisms that we try to use are very important.
You said that an effective way to raise environmental awareness is to use local resources, but environmental issues are global in nature. Is there any way to raise environmental awareness using global resources or cases?
This is the issue again of whether the glass is half full or half empty. We know that environmental issues are global and trans-boundary. That is why our focus area has gone beyond just northeast India but into the eastern Himalayas in Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and regions like that.
When we say local resources, the most important resource is the local know-how. In terms of the knowledge systems, in terms of the access to the community itself. The other thing often communities are or have been in the past because of the developmental policies of the central government in terms of helping backward communities like our regions, they have just been pouring in a lot of money; money that is not even accounted for. They say, "You need money for roads, you need money for this and that". This has also brought about a lot of corruption. It has brought about a lot of dependency on the government by the communities. So we are trying to make communities realize that we need to hold back and see where we are going, what we can do by ourselves and what we can't do by ourselves. This is where the whole issue of local resources comes in. And of course it is important to reflect on global issues and take advantage of the opportunities of the Internet of global funding, networking, inter-projects. So we focus more on the regional level, because an NGO cannot do everything at all the levels. There are other NGOs that can take off. It's like a relay race. If I try to run all 1500 meters by myself, I don't think I can manage, but we try to run our lap, our part of the race well, which is work within the regional level. After that, we can take it forth to the other rung of NGOs who are doing that. At the same time that is why we are also not going to much into grass root in terms of trying to do all of the activities ourselves. That is why we are using the grass root work of the CBOs and NGOs.
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