Blue Dolphin Group on Wednesday

On Wednesday afternoon the Blue Dolphin Group made a SALT visit to the Chrysalide Rehabilitation Centre to meet with staff and residents of the female drug users’ rehabilitation centre. The visitors were Célicia, Nadine, Gloria, Autry, Annick, Pouba, Tricia and Rituu.

Chrysalide Rehabilitation Centre

Here is the AER for the visit:

What went well?

• • The facilitator had prepared well for the visit. Good bodily communication (non-verbal) and switching from French to English while facilitating at the same time. Patience! With the team and with the community- helped achieve the goal at the end of the day.

  • The ice-breaker “who are we?” exercise (introducing ourselves as a fruit in pairs, really helped people bond and share in a more intimate setting before moving into group discussions).

  • The generosity, openness and participation of community members- we can’t do anything unless the content is good- and here the content was excellent!

  • Dividing into two groups helped in detailed discussions.

  • Probing questions by Paul in the breakaway session helped delve deeper into the stories.

  • We were able to accomplish what we wanted to achieve as we got both the stories and principles for action.

  • We were able to manage stories from three languages –Creole, French and English.

  • Pouba’s presence was a definite plus! Important to have someone who knew French, English AND creole, and who grew increasingly comfortable in facilitation.

What can we do better next time?

• • Difficult to manage without a Mauritian facilitator (Annick was sick). Better coordination with the overall team to ask a Mauritian facilitator of another team to come in and help (eg. Laurie’s group had Sandrine and Pamela as Mauritian facilitators and Autry on top of that- they could have spared one).

  • Facilitator felt pressurized (in charge of facilitating discussions, translating everything, and also main person for communication with organizers) and did not find support from the team as expected. The team said that they tried to support the facilitator but were not sure on how they could help (no experience with facilitation linked to the knowledge asset and therefore did not feel comfortable stepping in to facilitate). Facilitator will try to delegate more next time (for translation for instance, rely more on Pouba).

  • In the breakaway group the one with Therese as facilitator had all other team members who were Anglophones, which hampered the conversation. A translator would have helped in this important session as a bilingual was missing.