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Questions and Answers
Communication: Diversity & language problems?
My state alone (Nagaland) , which is very small has 32 dialects. So we cannot understand each other at all. That is why we have English, not Hindi as the official language. We don't even speak Hindi. I studied in Delhi by I can neither read nor write Hindi. I can speak in Hindi. So communication is an issue. It depends on how you can bring it down to a pure level and start communicating. One very good example of why we can communicate very easily is because we don't work at the pure grass root level in terms of doing core activities. We work with our NGOs and CBOs. We train them. We facilitate them. We go with them but we are there as more observers to help connect with them. So it is much easier for an organization like us. But yes, communication is a big problem. Communicating with some communities is more difficult if you don't understand the culture. The moment you understand the culture, it is much easier to communicate with them. When we send our project staff into a community that person may be from the same community, but if that person has an urban upbringing, then we find that he or she is not a good person to go to the rural communities because the urban and rural perspectives are very different. We often try to look for people who understand who the village people are. For example a villager may refer to a plant in a particular way, which another person will refer to in another way. And even with people who communicate the same way it is, communication is a very tricky subject.
You can give people the same instructions; tell them the same thing, but the come up with different designs. Now this is what happens when you go to a community and try to speak with them, even in the same language, because people have different perspectives.
The same group of people, who understand the same language, yet people take things differently. When you are talking about development and bigger issues, it gets more complicated. So it is definitely a challenge that we have.
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