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07.01.07 – 07.07.07
Posted By Radhika
The Past Week: 07.01.07 � 07.07.07
Current project
- Make Rewari sale
This has still not been completed. I expected to complete this tasks week ago. While having failed at it over several consecutive weeks, I’ve come to realize three things about myself: I’m idealistic and I’ve got to work on my management skills. Firstly, my idealism lies in the fact that I expected this to get done about a month ago but didn’t do much to motivate the women to complete it. However, to instill a sense of urgency in the women, I gave them a date on which I wanted to send out the compost. Still, they didn’t work as hard as I’d hoped and thought they would.
In terms of my management skills, I thought I would set a day in which the women would weigh the compost in shifts. While seven out of 11 of them showed and weighed all the compost that was in bags, most of the women felt that it was enough to do the weighing and went home without maintaining their beds. They made little effort in removing the compost that was ready on their beds. Looking back I should have created one of these ’shift-days’ a week for a month or so. I think the women would have taken this seriously and would have showed up.
This situation has been enormously distressing amongst other problems that the project is riddled with (group politics, the near collapse of the shed, the women being unwilling to leave the dhaani to market, etc.). I spent nearly all day yesterday helping the women package and removing compost from beds. Some women say I should have called all of them to the shed instead of doing it alone but I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t want to have to go house-to-house anymore. I’m going back to Ashok Nagar this evening when I know that most of them come maintain their beds so I’m going to request that they each give about two hours of their time tomorrow to help clear out as many beds as possible. I think I can count on a core group of women to show and take on the responsibilities that they said they would take on when first starting the project.
Jul 7th, 2007