Talk about doing things that make us laugh at our own selves for acting like babes in the rural development woods when we should have known better. “Woods” is the crux word in that sentence. Let us explain.

We got 18,000+ of the best fruit plants for distribution to our river basin communities

Weheragala was one of the observation areas for COLIBRI but our inception report indicated that we should not try to work with them because their soil toxicity levels were too high to be impacted by a short-term project. However, we did earmark 25 families in the area because it was strategically important to the upper KCF because it borders it downstream and is an entry point for various nefarious activities including setting fire to the woods. We went in initially thinking that we would work with that limited group to create a fire-belt but then realized that we needed to expand the treatment to increase ago-biodiversity in the area as both an incentive and a response in line with COLIBRI’s conservation-livelihood link. So we selected 114 families and provided them with 8 fruit plants each as a foundation for increasing overall green cover. Tragically, since this was a last minute addition, we never got a chance to visit those homesteads individually so we were completely unaware of what was actually happening. We can give a hundred excuses why we never did something fundamental to our type of development work but we won’t. We will simply say “we screwed up” because that is the short and long of it.

Home garden foliage so dense that no fruit or flower grew or was even required to be grown by these trees

What we hadn’t realized was that Weheragala was an NGO pea-soup. Every do-good mother’s son had gone in before us. NGO #1  gives them five fruit plants. The villages pick those up because they are given for free. NGO #2 gives them five fruit plants. The villages pick those up because they are given for free. NGO #3  gives them five fruit plants. The villages pick those up because they are given for free. They take all these inputs (most of them bad but some of them actually grow you know). They plant them willy-nilly on their small homesteads. There is no knowledge given to them on how to get a fruit harvest, how to manage their foliage and green cover or how to engage in postharvest storage. So, with decent amounts of water available and good soil nutrition because they had not used any agrochemicals on their own homesteads, these fruit plants grew into massive trees happy and content, full of leaves and…? Zero fruit. Why would a happy tree need to propagate itself? It is healthy and alive. It had never had any shocks in its life so all it had to do was grow and grow and grow.Those home “gardens” were no longer gardens. They were woods for crying out loud!

Enter the GMSL. We! In our naiveté, give them … you guessed it … not five but eight fruit plants. Granted we gave them superb specimens carefully selected, packed and transported. When we were distribution these plants, we were asked if we could give them 50kg fertilizer bags to plant them in, every alarm bell started to ring. Immediate physical visits to the homes were conducted and we found that every single one of them had a dense green canopy overhead that cut out most of the light. They wanted to plant our inputs in bags so they could shift them to those few areas where sunlight was actually available!

We did what anyone would do. We sat on a hypothetical rock, held our collective heads in our hands and shook them slowly from side to side. Stupefaction at our foolishness, disbelief at our silliness, horror at our unpreparedness were all thoughts that chased each other across our minds. It was actually laughable the way we had been taken in.

Department resource person training villagers on pruning techniques

Well, we were not going to simply sit by, shrugs our shoulders, smile inanely, take photos and leave. Nah. That’s not our way. We got people from the Export Agriculture Department and Forest Department to come and train those folks on how to prune their green cover to get themselves a proper yield as well as increase the footprint of sunlight on their gardens. Next, we told them how to optimize and redesign their gardens and most importantly we told them in no uncertain terms not to keep succumbing to the insane idea that everything given free is a good thing.

While we managed to significantly cut the losses and reverse any negatives of our unprepared intervention and actually gave them a better way forward, we made a mental note to do something we had not really done before. Check, before doing anything in any location for other NGO action because such action is not readily visible because well… most NGO action lives only as long as a project lives as we all know. We didn’t do it at Weheragala and we almost paid for it in an NGO disaster.

Villagers pruning their trees

Villagers pruning their trees

Our cascade trainer Swarna instructs the team of women from Sulugune on manufacture of organic inputs

We didn’t update our journey over December. What with Christmas and other happy-type events …things kinda slide and must do’s become optional do’s in those types of time brackets. Anyway, our cascade trainers hit the ground over December and January. They were fairly well trained to coach the farmers. And we mean coach – not train. Training encompasses lots of things – not all of which is directly relevant to a particular task.

For example, a person training someone else on biodiversity will instruct them on everything from international covenants through diversity dynamics of a given geography to the realities of agricultural crop diversity to the actual biological assets and what determines whether each flies or dies. This is because they need that sort of holistic knowledge if they are to train others. However, when those “others” are farmers, fighting to keep their noses above water, battling impossible odds, taking whatever comes their way to keep the home fires burning for one more day… well… those warriors have no time to be told the merits of a specific type of metal over another in the mammoty they use against a soil hardened to rocklike consistency by a two year drought. They need to know how to secure their water. They do not need to count unhatched chickens or should we say unharvested cinnamon and simply need to know how to actually get to the point where a harvest is possible. Once they’ve got their outcome, then we can start thinking about markets, prices and replenishing of seed stocks.

This is why we changed the way we do things from “training” to “coaching”. Instead of throwing the knowledge book at them or bashing them over the head with it, we simply instruct them, stage by stage, what to do to get to the next level. Our TOTs were given very clear instructions on what to say, and above all, when to say it.Their task timeline was simple. First tell the farmers what sort of mad exercise they were engaging in with agrochemicals and why they would never get anywhere in life with those. Next, tell them they have a hard journey ahead of them. Then stop sermonizing. Teach them how to create organic inputs. Give them seeds, tell them how to replenish them. Tell them how to plant and how to maintain their crops. Tell them how to harvest and store. Give them instructions on seed banking individually and collectively. Link them to markets. Get them their deserved profits. Make sure they are capable of continuing down this altered farming path. Add a final sermon on the shame of dependency. Get the hell out of the place and let the people do their thing. Each of those to be delivered in the right amount at the right time.

Just as much as we think we did a decent job of training them, we think they did a very decent job of using that training to coach the 2250 farmers. As with Bolt, the farmers now know how to get themselves up, running, planting. Next steps? Well… not now. Later.

The father figure and spiritual soul of the Greens – Asoka Harischandra speaks to the children

Trust them to come through is all we can say. The children’s societies that we established were so enthusiastically supported by the kids and their parents that we ourselves were taken aback. We gave them nothing but direction and triggered them to action and wow! did they deliver. The kids self-mobilized in those areas where the GMSL was working to establish and/or improve green cover and that included canopy roads, aforrestation, flower and herbal gardens. What was very heartening to see was that they dove in on their own, creating little cultural skits while they went about the serious task of helping their communities to improve the quality of their environment. Of course their parents were also equally involved and they hovered around the kids, gently watching over them.

For us, it was proven yet again that the

Kids planting the trees that will create a new canopy road

whole-of-community approach that has most shaking in fear is actually the most beneficial and most sustainable way of doing something. You see, instead of harping on piecemeal rights such as women’s rights, children’s rights, youth rights and human rights which essentially fracture communities and cause internal conflict, we were only interested in one thing – community rights and for those, the entire community stood together in a cohesive whole, stronger for the fact and enjoying the one real right that is useful to them in building their resilience. COLIBRI is about community not individuality. We are simply reminding communities of the power of togetherness and my my, are they reaping the rewards of that sort of thinking. We are smiling.

From the classroom…

Early days yet folks but we think we’ve put the community in the best possible position to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The candidates that we had short listed for training as community coaches were given one heck of a knowledge injection. No, that’s not quite correct. It was more like a knowledge-skill-practice-awareness-insight-empathy-understanding type of engagement that stretched over five whole days. It combined class room type instruction, breakouts, practical sessions and additional engagement and dialogue that stretched far into the night. Remember that our group of TOTs were already formidable in their own right. So instead of being passive listeners who transmogrify into future disasters (God how we hate that breed) these women and men had much to contribute to the sessions making them active, contentious and interesting. The trainers and the trained both strove mightily to arrive at a third space where the combined capabilities of both could be gelled into a whole from which everyone involved learned and put everyone in a position to serve the KCF and its people better.

Ok… as far as the boring report blogging” is concerned… here goes:

…to the breakout room…

The TOT training program for 23 shortlisted individuals (8 women and 15 men) was conducted concluded a few days ago. The GMSL shortlisted 11 resource persons to for the 5 day training program which ran from 01st to 5th of November 2021 at the Wingate Hotel in Nagolla, Hettipola. The individuals covered areas related to Environment, Natural Farming, Development and Community Cohesion. The Assistant District Secretaries of both Matale and Kandy attended the training program to show support for the exercise and speak to the participants and pledge their continued assistance. Suranjan (CEO GMSL) took on the exposition of the tasks and needs and the global scenario with respect to environment and agriculture, Lionel (Director SDB/Treasurer GMSL) was the mobilizer par excellence who managed the entire program, Amila (Curator, Parks Department and ex-GMSL activist) discussed biodiversity, Nimal (GMSL agri-advisor)  took them through the gamut of skills required for natural farming and informed the group on how to create their gardens to mimic nature as was done in the past during that era when things were actually sustainable and where sustainability was not some useless buzzword as it is today (heh), Leel (Additional Director EnMin) put them in touch with the planet and gave them a goodly shot of global environmental covenants to mess their minds with (j/k), Illange (Engineer from Minipe Irrigation) discussed with them the importance of soil and water conservation and how carelessness can screw up everything for everyone in that respect and Ilmi (Project officer, Export Agri Dept. Laggala) told them very kindly but very firmly that they must work with entrepreneurial mindsets to make sure that export agricultural crops from the region can actually help their economies stabilize.

…to open spaces…

That was tiring. But that sort of reporting is the darling of all report mongers so I suppose its good to have it out there for anyone to see. A fact about the shortlisted individuals was that they were a mixed bunch age-wise and gender wise. There was no specific NGO-ese targeting of equal numbers of men and women for the simple reason that if there was a tough cookie who was a man and that man performed better than a woman he was chosen and vice versa. We did not want to have affirmative action (that is for countries where men and women work together) but equitable action (that is for countries such as ours where men and women work with each other). On the other hand, if a young buck proved she was better at something than someone twice her age, she was in. It was simply a matter of determining who was most suited to do the work, had the most energy, displayed the greatest committment and that overarched every other consideration because we didn’t have time for either niceties or political correctness which would end up with all reported check-boxes ticked and jak done on the ground. We do not apologize for actually working instead of doing the NGO thing of merely reporting.

The practical exercises in the field were a mixed bag actually. On the one hand, they proved that the knowhow of some of the TOTs was questionable while at other times, it proved that they knew better but couldn’t do better because of economic pressure and we had to tell them – THAT IS WHY COLIBRI EXISTS!

… to the great classroom of living nature and human effort within that reality.

The work that these men and women are tasked with is arduous. With 2250 families to be coached they certainly have their work cut out for them – as do we who must watch over them and dive into the breach when such necessity arises. Although they already knew this was no casual NGO exercise, a key factor that we informed them of was that their field work was not going to be based on training. That is, they were not supposed to take all that they had acquired and slam dunk it down the throats of the farmers. We simply told them that the farmers won’t care for half of what you know but over half of them will only be half as interested in what you actually tell them if they believe that that is all you know. Indicate to them that you are fully aware but tell them only what is required to improve their livelihoods, increase their economic stability and ensure their social well being. Above all, we told them to pay heed to those psychology and human empathy factors that they were told of during their own training sessions and to think, speak and act in ways that would inspire their charges and not disappoint them.

We believe that our trainers/field assistance or whatever understood what we told them. The days to come will very quickly let us know if our programing, our strategy, our knowledge imparting technique are working for these were created from scratch and not some curriculum that was hijacked or copied from somewhere else. It was created for the uniquely diverse terrain that we all know as the KCF and its environs. It was created to optimize the harmony of the human-environment interface while making sure that the human-social interface was improved. It is indeed a tough ask.

As we said, early days. Let’s see. We have put the pieces in place to be able to drive this down the field and kick it over the uprights. The future will tell how good the fit of those pieces are with each other and their communities. We will be watching.

Here we go – that typical NGO photo *grins*

What is WRONG with us? lol. Oh well. This is happening a bit too frequently for comfort.

Remember we reported that we had found our teams of TOTs and Watchdogs not too long ago? Saying glory hallelujah while we were about it? Well! So much for the haloos and yays. Suranjan and Dougie went in to check and interview the short listed candidates for themselves and as the discussions wore on, some doubt, some false note crept in. They were masters at identifying irregularities and this was no exception. Some of the people who were touted as being “it and a bit” by some of our field staff were found to be seriously lacking in any sort of skill. Further inquiries by the GMSL leaders found that some of those who had been long listed were actually buddies or those with whom our field staff had established special relationship (ahem) during the course of their work. What can we say?

“Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck YUCK! Go away and do it all over again and this time, get the REAL men and women into the long list because we know you know who they are!”.

And…. so it came to pass. The second round of candidates proved to be the real deal. We had no problems with them and our leaders were able to get the final list of our well… call ’em whatever you want … coaches, trainers, community mobilizers, field assistants … guardians of the KCF if not the galaxy… whatever. 8 women and 15 men who truly deserved to help their communities help themselves were finalized. Dodged that one. Phew.

But then again, this is the type of thing that makes our work so … bloody interesting yeah? This understanding of human fallibility. No one was penalized for tracking down a bad path. They were just told not to do it again. As we said in our promise to the world “However, we also recognize in our lessening, in our self-destructive debilitation, an inherent and undeniable albeit frustrating and agonizing beauty to our kaleidoscopically colored and shaded world, its plants, its animals and its people. In that diversity, we know people are varied in their thoughts, words, actions and desires and each possesses a gamut of qualities ranging from the very good to the very bad but all of it is what makes up the reality of us and ours. In these dark times we live in, we truly know that when given the choice, we more often choose wrong than choose right. We, therefore, choose to be kind. First to ourselves and the possibility that we shall err and fail and then towards that very possibility inherent in every other sentient being“. Our teams are great. They may fail a few times but we know something about them. They have never, so far, ever made the same mistake twice and that is not because we chose the easy way out by throwing the rule book at them. In our country, that works contrapositively. No, we reminded them of our traditions of straight talking and even straighter shooting. They got it. We know it. That second round of TOTs and watchdogs? They were pure diamonds in the rough and it was that very same bunch of our field personnel who gave them to us.