WHO IS POOR

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.
They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.
On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"
"It was great, Dad."
"Did you see how poor people live?" the father asked.
"Oh yeah," said the son.
"So, tell me, what you learned from the trip?" asked the father.
The son answered:
"I saw that we have one dog and they had four.
We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.
We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.
Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.
We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.
We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.
We buy our food, but they grow theirs.
We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them."
The boy's father was speechless.
Then his son added, “Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are."

Isn't perception a wonderful thing?
If we all saw everything the same way, there is hardly anything to learn Next time someone disagrees with you remember that it is an opportunity to learn a new perception.

TOT on Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction

The TOT on Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR) was organized from 25-31 May 2009 at Kampong Chhnang province. This 7-day training was conducted by ActionAid Cambodia with strong collaboration of National Committee for Disaster Management (NCDM) and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MOEYS) of Kingdom of Cambodia and funded by ECHO. There were 25 practionners from I/NGOs and GOs including ActionAid itself, LWF, Plan International, World Vision, PCDM of and Department of EYS of Banteay Meanchey, Kratie and Svay Rieng, NCDM and Pedagogy Research Department of MOEYS.
The TOT aims to enable participants to be more efficient and effective in promoting the concepts of DRR, and application of its various tools through a participatory approach:
The specific objectives identified are
- To deepen the concept of DRR and its relevance in the overall development of the country;
- To develop facilitation and animation skills on DRR using participatory tools and techniques.
- To provide specific skills to integrate DRR as part of long term national and sub national development plans of the country.
The training was led by Mr. PV Krishnan, an experienced trainer and practitioner in DRR and exposed to various country programmes and a support team. He is well versed with in DRR concepts DIPECHO projects and worked as DIPECHO Manager in NEPAL in the past. He has been exposed to humanitarian programmes and played a leadership role in promoting SPHERE standards in South Asia.
Overall, the course was well received by the participants. Being a dynamically structured workshop ensuring participatory and strategic inputs, the workshop followed daily feedback and review sessions, ensuring that not only did participants received opportunity to comment on the days content and methods but also exposing them to different types of evaluations and reviews.
The facilitation was totally based on participatory methods, giving ample space and time for the participants to share their experiences and ideas while expressing their opinions also. The pre-designed loose structure also ensured that modifications could be included in the subject matters so that participants could relate better with the process. In addition to participatory sharing and learning, there was also scope for power point presentations, brain storming sessions and focused group discussions.
The overall training event was a huge success and naturally, matter of great satisfaction for the facilitators. There are areas to improve and the constant effort to seek improvement will surely ensure that facilitators, organizers and participants will raise the standard of training in future.

See the full report, see full list of participants