Someone to Help Make Tortillas

Development often fails due to simple oversights, and my job is largely about trying to plan and monitor projects to avoid these oversights.  This month I was helping to evaluate training sessions in people’s homes about how to maintain the filters they had received through NE’s arsenic alleviation project.  We came to a house at mid-morning to find the woman that we wanted to talk to busy milling corn and making tortillas.  She tried to give us her attention but was obviously distracted.  

During the training I was sitting at the woman’s kitchen table, watching her work at the corn mill while the trainer was trying to tell her how to filter poison out of her water, scribbling in my notebook about how we would need to improve the timing of these visits, when it occurred to me that I may be able offer more than notes on the need to be sensitive to domestic responsibilities when scheduling training sessions.  I can also turn the crank of a corn mill. 

And so I asked the women if she would mind if I took a turn at the mill.  She wiped the sweat off her brow and said that would be just fine.  The rest of the training went very well and by the end she seemed to have a good grasp of it.  All that had been missing was someone to help make tortillas.

In development it is important to pay attention to detail and make thoughtful plans, because the situations are often complicated, because intervening in people’s lives is a serious responsibility, and because development often fails due to very basic mistakes.  However, because the work is serious, it is easy to make the mistake of taking our plans and ourselves too seriously.  I am as guilty of this as anyone, and for that reason I found my morning of milling corn quite satisfying.  At least in this case, I was able to avoid such a simple oversight.