Several months back, Ivy Anthony, a community leader from a savings
scheme in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, went on an exchange visit to
another savings scheme in Kwa Zulu Natal.
The idea was to get help from a stronger group and pick up some
strategies for dealing with some repayment problems they’d been having
in her area - an area which had gained the reputation of something of a
problem child in the South African Homeless Federation.
In Kwa Zulu Natal, however, she encountered problems with repayment
that were as bad - if not worse - than her group’s back home.
There were other problems as well - one leader had made off with the
week’s savings. Instead of enlightenment, she encountered mayhem, and
found herself in the unexpected position of offering advice, even
suggesting ways of getting the money back! A few days later, a newly
confident Ivy returned to the Eastern Cape, with fresh energy to tackle
their local problems. "I don’t know why everyone is making
such a fuss about our repayment problems - they’re not as bad as I
thought!"
Exchanges take many forms.
Some are like wake-up calls, some are highly ritualized, others are big
events. Some work like museum visits, others like comfy drop-in visits
between old chums.
Some exposures have events that are carefully planned, all worked
out, and others fly by in a chaotic whirl. Some encourage reflection,
some galvanize to immediate action. But one thing that is common to all
- no matter what the protocol - and that is that afterwards, when people
go back home, or when they see off their visitors, they are a
little bit different.
Something has happened to shake things up - something always
happens.
Ivy didn’t get what she bargained for in Kwa Zulu Natal, but she
did get something. And that something set her work back
home a clear step ahead of where it had been before she left.
It’s often like that with exposure, where going somewhere else -
someplace very different - can work on a mind that has got stuck like a
good healthy thwack!
This is especially so the first time out.
After a while, of course, if you come a second time and a third, that
sense of shock diminishes and you progress to other insights, to deeper
levels of understanding and the life of an exchange relationship
moves ahead.
You progress from being shocked by something to understanding it, and
from comparing that situation to your own to having ideas to improve
it.
Each place provides its own unique thwack, and it’s own say of aiming
it, to help visitors open up room for the next, more important part,
which is the learning.
In the following pages we take a brief look at a few
examples of typical community to community exchanges supported by
ACHR's TAP programme and Slum Dwellers International.
