Nonviolence Training and Education

en
convened
by Patricio Vejar, Chile

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

Gender and Body Language

convened
by Imke Kreusel, Germany

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: A Method for Working in Groups

convened
by Andreas Speck and Silke Kreusel

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
Programmes & Projects

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