The bad news that every community that uses CLCP for the first time should know

A story of Local Response from Katabi community, Uganda by Phil

The bad news that every community that uses CLCP for the first time should know

We had 6 facilitators from 3 organisations that came together for our project and in June we were all given training in SALT and CLCP. In early July, our project involved the 6 facilitators going to Kibaha a district in Tanzania with the objective of working in 10 communities. The purpose of the project was to encourage the communities to take ownership of their own health.

We had 10 communities and I will take as an example the community called Mwendapole. As a new facilitator I went to the area trying to train the people how they can live healthy lives, how they can improve their health and also how they can reduce the levels of NCD.

During the first month we trained the community members, the river was stable. Everybody was coming and listening to us. They wrote down what was expected of them. We asked the community to build their dream. What do you want for the members of your community? We want to live a healthy life, to have good health and to live a good life. We asked the community to come up with their own dream. As a facilitator, I do not belong to the community. It was for the members of the community themselves to decide what they wanted to do best. So they came up with their dream. They were ambitious and in their dream they said that by 2025, they wanted everybody to be aware of how they can reduce their level of obesity, they wanted everybody practising healthy living, and for people going to use health clinics on a regular basis.

When you are planning it is easy because it is about writing. But when it comes to implementing things got difficult. Some people dropped out, some people left because they thought this it was too difficult. Some of them thought that the project was not applicable to them.

After more than 3 months they had managed to make some progress with the active aging group. But still there was no progress on the vegetable garden.

The turning point came when we arranged a learning festival for all of the communities. All of the 10 communities came to the festival. People brought news of their progress with diagrams and pictures and some of the progress was very impressive indeed. The people of Mwendapole were excited and impressed by the achievements of their peer villages. And perhaps they were a little bit embarrassed.

The news that other communities were starting to build their shared dreams certainly changed the mood at Mwendapole. We facilitators directed all of our efforts towards those who showed interest in taking action and we made little effort to convert those who showed no enthusiasm. It started slowly, but they began to take actions. When they took those actions they found that they excelled. They have a very good plan and they carried out their Action Plan. Now they have a very big plantation. They are living healthy lives. They have a group of older people doing exercises. They visit health clinics daily. They are doing so well.

When the community began to move from planning to action, the community found that words and writing are easier than doing. The gap between planning and doing is large and facilitators had to work hard to help the community to bridge that gap.