Dear CO Friends,
After coming back from the CO course 2008, I have lots of sharing about CO Course with my colleagues and friends। They all were too excited to know the SEAPCP approach towards community organizing and tools/creative media that SEAPCP has developed over the time through their experience. I shared the books with them as well and they all had their mouths wide open….wow…॥great books! I shared with them how we can apply SEAPCP approach of community organizing in our situation to make our communities more self reliant, then NGO dependent. We decided to organize a formal training for this purpose. This is where my tough task started.
Well, some of you might know this, that Pakistani society is very much conservative; due to cultural and religious norms, intermingling of sex, specially shaking hands and hugging between men and women is very uncommon, even most men do not hug their closely related female relatives, except for their sisters, mothers and the most immediate relatives। This is especially very true in the context of people who we deal with as community level because for our elites there are no boundaries; they do everything and anything they want to……! As a matter of fact, many of the activities that we did in the CO course, and otherwise the ones mentioned in Jo Hann’s book (the yellow one), require inter-mingling.
As I sit down to plan two-days training course on CO Course, I was kept on thinking for hours and hours which activities to pick keeping in mind our the cultural context of Pakistan। I had lots of apprehensions on different activities. But I know, you my creative friends out there, can really help me out, please help me pick the right activities which I can easily use in the CO training.
