Patricio led us in an exercise used in his country to help empower people to act despite their fears during the dictatorship. He asked us to think of a time we felt very afraid. In silence we were to express our fear through the position of our bodies. He then moved us into pairs. We were asked to try to remove the other person's fear in silence, while still feeling your own fear. We were then moved by the facilitator into fours, and then into contact with the whole group. The exercise was powerful, and most people felt like it was hard to keep feeling your fear when you were in contact with others, especially with the whole group caring for one another. We also noticed how helping each other open and relax our body postures helped reduce our feelings of fear, as did reassuring physical touch from our partners.
After the exercise we had a real-life opportunity to support someone experiencing great fear, when a participant suddenly joined the group and spoke of death threats his group had received after a misleading article about them was published in the local paper in Krajina, where they were working in support of refugees. The town includes 11,000 Croatians, 2500 Bosnian Croat refugees (who are living in houses abandoned by Croatian Serbs who were forced to flee during the war) and 1,000 Croatian Serbs who are returning to their homes. The local government is not encouraging the Croatian Serbs to return, nor the Bosnian Croats to go back to Bosnia -- they are offering the Bosnian Croats jobs even before local Croats (in an area of high unemployment) in order to induce them to stay. The newspaper article reported that the group assisting the refugees was one-sidedly helping the Serbs to return, and this had led to death threats against the three staff members of the group (which is associated with Pax Christi). The two local staff were afraid to leave their homes, and the internationalist was highly anxious about their safety as well as his own. As a group we were able to listen actively to him, share ideas, experiences, and resources (this was definitely a room full of people with a large amount of experience in these matters!) and at the end we made a loving and supportive circle around him. It was a great opportunity to practice what we had just learned, and the participant certainly calmed down and was quite visibly able to think more clearly by the time he left.
report by Vivien Sharples
We formed small groups of three or four, and were given three minutes to creates three situations which would portray stereotypical male/female body language. We then presented the situations as a tableau (no movement or speech) to the group, who guessed which characters were supposed to be men and which were women, and tried to guess how each character might be feeling. This technique brought out a lot of laughter and discussion very quickly, and is a great tool which could be adapted to other types of issues. It's fun, very participatory, and can lead to interesting insights. The workshop leader showed us photos taken at a railway station without the subjects' knowledge, which showed consistent gender differences in body language (eg women sitting with legs together or crossed at the knee, and men with their legs wide apart taking up a lot more space; women standing unbalanced, weight on one leg or the other, and men standing evenly with their legs apart, hands on hips, pelvis thrust forward.)
The point was made that our body language affects our feelings, and therefore our behaviour, and vice versa, so one way to change ourselves is to consciously change our body language, which can lead to different feelings. For example, if you want to speak out in large meetings, it's hard to get up the courage to do that if you're holding your body in a shrinking and hangdog manner. If you change to an open and upright stance you make room for more confidence to emerge, and your voice can be louder. Imke told us that European studies have shown that body language tends to fit most with gender stereotypes during the ages of 15 to 25, when people are trying to show that they are a "real" man or woman. Imke also passed around an amazing series of photos of Egyptian sculptures showing how a in matriarchal society, the women in sculptures of male/female couples often had their arm round the man's waist or shoulder, while the man's arms were by his side. This contrasts with modern Western images which consistently show the man's arm around the woman. It seemed like a clear indicator of power relations, and not as related to height as we might think.
report by Vivien Sharples
The Organising Circle is a structured method developed by German activists to help activists plan their work so that aspects often overlooked are actively considered. It names stages to work through: the beginning, the analysis, the goal, the strategy, the development of activities, the realisation of activities, and the evaluation. These stages are laid out on a grid, with the stages across the top and other aspects listed down the other axis: group members, group values and principles, resources, structure and process, problem and solution, communication, and environment. The group then systematically fills in the grid. For example, if a group starts to clarify its beginning, the question of "resources" is important: "What resources do we have?" (eg time, money, rooms, materials, contacts, technology, volunteers, etc) . In the "goals" stage, the personal goals of the group members should be made known, and during the development of the strategy, a group has to answer the question of which target groups or constituencies they want to reach with their project.
While the structure is generally laid out as a grid, it can also be pictured as a rope with the seven aspects as cords which wind around one another. Together they make up the stages, which follow each other in the rope. The idea is that if a group works through the whole Organising Circle, it leads to a structural and transparent working which is directed to the group's goals and doesn't ignore the group members' needs. We tried out some parts of the Circle using a situation faced by Triennial organisers in real life, concerning visa denials and people stuck at borders. I found it a helpful tool, although it seemed like it could be a trifle compulsive to go through the entire grid, because it would take a really long time. But most groups I've worked with don't do enough of this sort of conscious planning and strategising, or don't do it well enough yet because it's so difficult, so I appreciated learning about this way of doing it. Unfortunately, the organisers believe that one needs a five-day seminar to learn it properly. I think some of it could be used directly. For more information, write to patchwork@oln.comlink.apc.org.
report by Vivien Sharples