Positive Deviance

So, one really interesting part of our training is that we get an introduction to how to do development work. There are probably a million things that would fall under the description of ‘development work’ but for my purposes I will relate everything to what the sectors here in Burkina are working with, so that includes education, the education and empowerment of girls, health and small business enterprise as well as bringing change to developing nations in general. So far we have discussed working within the village to find out what they want/need, not imposing on them what we think they need. We also discussed ensuring that any changes we make are not going to harm the community in any way, ensuring that the structure and integrity of the culture are still intact while trying to make any sort of improvements (and I’m using improvement really loosely here). The other day we had a session on Positive Deviance, which is actually a concept that I think everyone is familiar with, but I just didn’t have a name for it before. Positive deviance is looking for a solution to a community or group problem by looking for examples that already exist within the community; looking for those few people who are doing something slightly different and getting different results.

The example that is most relevant for the work I am going to do here is the example of keeping girls in school. The dropout rate is much higher for girls than boys here, mostly because girls are expected to do more at home and a lot of people don’t see the value of giving girls an education. But in each village there are girls going to school. So these girls and their families are our positive deviants. They have the same resources as their neighbors, but they are doing something different that makes is possible for their daughters to stay in school. Maybe they relieve the responsibilities of the girls a little. Maybe they bought a lamp so that when the girls are done with their required chores, they have a way to finish their homework in the dark. (This one really stuck out to me, because my future village doesn’t have electricity, so if the girls have to hurry home to finish chores before the sun sets, how do they do their homework?) So, once I get to village, if I think that I want to try and increase the number girls at school (which I’m sure is something I will work with in some way over the next two years), I hope to be able to meet and talk with families who have daughters and see if any tactics they use could be accessible to the entire community. While there is a huge bridge to gap between saying that is what I should do and actually doing it, I hope to get there eventually. :)

Another thing we talked about with this topic is dividing out good examples from the “True, but Useless” ideas. Like maybe the family that sends their daughter to school is able to afford a maid to do all the chores the daughter would normally have to do. So this family would not count in our context as a positive deviant because they are not working with the same resources as everyone else.

As I said before, this idea is not a completely new concept. The most obvious example I thought of for the US was in the business world: if you have one store that is making more money than all your other stores, of course you are going to look and study that store in depth to figure out what it is exactly they are doing that is so different. But this is just the first time I’ve had this concept explained to me in a concrete way, so I’m pretty excited about it!

Also, the entire concept of having a philosophy to development work is also something I never thought about. (Just like I never really thought about having a teaching philosophy until I started teaching...) I think it was just something I thought looked cool, but never really looking to how it’s done or the idea that it isn’t all done in the same way. I know that we have heard several times the idea to Do No Harm, but I’m not sure if that is a philosophy across the whole of the Peace Corps, or if that is just a phrase that my Country Director really likes to use. So even though I am really tired at the end of the day, and I am really ready to be done with training, I like that our training has been (or has made an effort to be) all encompassing and focus on areas across the board as well as broad/general ideas that will certainly help us in any sort of job we will have after this. I hope to have more insightful thoughts on this topic in the future, right now it is just too new of an idea, I don’t really have any knowledge other than spitting back out what I’ve been told. But I’m excited to learn more!
Also, they gave us the website of the organization that came up with the exact model/definition of positive deviance the Peace Corps uses. I'm not really sure what's included in the website, but if your interested, check it out!
www.positivedeviance.org

The same day we had this session on Positive Deviance, we also had a session on potential ideas for working with health education at our sites. I know there is a CSPS (health center) just down the street from me, and I met three of the nurses who worked there (and they were all females!) so I already think that I would like to work with them on a few things.

But this week I gave my first test at model school, and I have to say, grading 60 tests is no fun. I can’t imagine what grading tests for two classes of 100 would be like. But lucky for me, I know my classes won’t be much bigger than 60 at my site. And next week is already our last week of model school! So soon!! This weekend I have another language test, and my goal is to reach two levels up (which is where I have to be before swear-in). Tomorrow we are having a session to practice cooking in Burkina, so I think that should pretty fun! I am still a little sick, but most certainly better than a couple weeks ago! I also chopped my hair off the past weekend, so I’ll have to get some pictures up once soon!!

I hope everyone is having a fun end of summer, I can’t believe you Iowa teachers already start in a couple weeks!