Getting to know each other
Tuesday we had another meeting. We had prepared a simple acitivity with the purpose of getting to know each other. It was important for future workshops that all participants would feel safe and comfortable in the arena from the beginning. The workshop was also created for us as facilitators to easily get to know the names and faces of all the participants, their skills and what products they currently feel comfortable making.
Planning, staging and conducting the workshop
The staging of the workshop was informal. We were all sitting in a circle on chairs or boxes in Wilfrido's home. Wilfrido and his wife thereby functioned as hosts, which gave a good balance between us all, making sure that we were not the only ones leading the workshop. The fact that we are not very strong in spoken Spanish also meant that Wilfrido took on the responsibility of explaining the activity together with us. Wilfrido is a trusted person in the community and it was clear that all participants feel comfortable around him. Similarly, we believe that our difficulties with speaking Spanish made us more approachable.
As it is common in Colombia, meeting times are not strictly followed. This meant that even though the starting time of the workshop was 6pm, participants did not start appearing until later. However, this gave us time to explain the workshop activity to Wilfrido, where we got to practice our Spanish while teaching him English. Learning English is a very important objective for Wilfrido, which we will keep as a regular part of the workshops.
The activity we had prepared was for each participant - including ourselves! - to have a profile made about themselves. The profiles were in three parts: 1. Mi personalidad (my personality), 2. Mi talento artistico (my artistic talent), and 3. Yo sé cómo hacer este producto (I know how to make this product). One part was filled out at a time and all participants would read aloud what was written on their profiles before proceeding to the next part. For the second part we had prepared a sheet with different skills related to the work of the artisans, that we had found through our previous trips to San Jacinto and Tuchin. The sheet made it easier for us to remember and understand the Spanish words for skills related to the artisan work and it gave an opportunity for Wilfrido to learn some new verbs in English as we had translated the sheet with him before the workshop began.
We were surprised about how open the participants were, since we were told by FEM that the Zenú community tend to be very shy. Again, we believe that our lack of Spanish showed them how we are not experts in everything and that we can be vulnerable. The participants showed great patience with us by listening carefully and for the most part speaking slowly. We could see a clear change from our last initial meeting in terms of how much each participant contributed in the dialogue. The biggest differences from our last meeting was that Ana Maria from FEM was not there to lead the meeting, which meant that we had to speak more (broken) Spanish and that participants had more room to speak as well. For the participants to be able to teach us some Spanish made them them experts in Spanish, which we will keep encouraging through the next workshops - especially to make sure that they also feel that they are the experts in creating the beautiful crafts.
Results
Looking at the filled out profiles it is clear that there are three main personality traits: being sociable, being friendly and working hard. Even though we had given some examples in shape of 'creative', 'serious' and 'happy', these words were not used much by the participants, which was good.
From the filled out profiles it was clear that the participants all had different skills and some shared skills from different stages of the process of creating the crafts currently found in Cartagena. Thus, from the group we could identify two painters, a salesman and -woman, four weavers in caña fletcha and two of them also knows iraca, a seamstress, two who knows how to color the materials, and one who knows the raw materials of caña fletcha and iraca and how to prepare them for weaving. Finally Wilfrido is talented with organizing people in the community as we have also seen through working with him thus far.
When looking at the last part, that of what products the participants know how to make it was really interesting how none of the participants wrote or talked much about specific products but instead focused on the techniques such as weaving, painting and growing raw materials. We see it as a strength for the project that the techniques of making any product was more in focus than already existing products - hopefully this means that the participants are open to developing new and different products.
