Alive and Kicking

Hm... somehow I had the impression that Terry's thought burps came around much more frequently. Well, I suppose that they occur quite often but usually with an audience, which to me obviates the need to blog about it. However, this blog has been too long neglected so I thought I'd give a little update/post.

This morning we facilitated an exercise during which we asked people to place themselves on a spectrum between "Efficiency" at one end and "Participation" at the other - recognizing that these are not mutually exclusive goals, but that sometimes one must be sacrificed in the interest of the other. It was a group of about 20 people, with roughly equal gender representation - and what do you know, only two women placed themselves on the "Efficiency" side (both from the US) and only two men placed themselves on the "Participation" side - one very close to the middle. The other is a Freirean ideologue from Brazil. Fascinating! We had not expected a gender pattern with this, so talked about it for a while. Turns out that most of the women came from a social work background, and most of the men from an engineering background - both roles important within Habitat. Even more fascinating.

The workshops have reinforced my understanding of contexts in which Terry does well and I don't - open-ended brainstorming kinds of contexts. At the end of the day yesterday I found myself gravitating to the back corner of the room with my knitting in frustration as the task of summarizing principles learned gave way to a free-for-all discussion about various inter-related ideas. Terry was in the thick of it, really in his element as various conceptual threads wove together... and the task of systematizing the "lessons learned" into a numbered or orderly list went by the wayside. Evidently T and I will work on that together back in VA.

We make a pretty good team.