Two workshops completed and some victories to be celebrated

Finally we got to do the first workshop with the community leaders and organizations present in Calabar. As usual when organizing an event it is the preparations that take you out, and we really worked hard in order to mobilize participants, have the right equipment and methodology. We arrived early, ate lunch, rigged our equipment and organized the placement of chairs… Fifteen minutes to start, we could only wait for the participants to arrive. State officials arrived, technicians from the communication boards came ready to take pictures and slowly the chairs became occupied – although not by the public we had hoped for. The community of Calabar, all the people we had invited, talked to both personally and on the phone did not show up in time. When half an hour had already passed, only three representatives from the community had arrived and we (maybe only me) started to get a bit anxious!

However, when the workshop finally started a man called Paulo that we had invited cited two poems, perfectly setting the mood for the tasks waiting. Our Director, Luiz Ferraro, held an initial speech and then we opened up for presentations. In the end about seven or eight different institutions/organizations where represented (The basket ball teem, the women association, the community library, the food cooperative, a theater organization etc).

Our objective for the day where to plant in the people participating a seed of inspiration towards different ways to bring the community together in educative, cultural and recreational activities and how this can be done in a collective and participatory manner. We brought to them some examples from other communities in Salvador where written material had been use to collect and share experiences as well as a video that was made to tell the history and heritage of the inhabitants in Bairro da Paz (The Peace Neighborhood). We asked them to reflect over the challenges and potentials inherited in the way the neighborhood works and what differences and similarities they felt existed between Calabar and Bairro da Paz. This way a discussion concerning issues such as stigmatization, history and culture as well as ideas on what kind of activities would suit the neighborhood of Calabar, the re-opening of a community newspaper etc. started.

Another one of our goals for the day was to initiate a mapping of local socioeconomic experiences, which is to be continued in the following meetings. We invited all participants to give us the answers to the following questions and put them up on the wall together as they gave us a more detailed presentation. This exercise was a important for us, the mapping process as for the organizations that participated because it generated that a lot of interesting connections where made between the participants when they realized how much they had in common and how they could collaborate in order to gain capacity in their community activities.

Finally, we invited the participants to continue the work by forming a group with the aim of promoting Environmental Education and social activities in in order to evolve the potentials existent in the community. They gave themselves the name Vozes do Calabar, (The Voices of Calabar) and when leaving the workshop we had already set a new date for the next meeting.

We left with the feeling of having helped to form a small, but strong group of community members with the potential of creating a continuing work with environmental education in the neighborhood. It will be very interesting to continue working with them!