* REPORT : 4

Face to face - a comprehensive detailed discussion of the ideas, practices, and results of horizontal or community - to - community exchanges within the SDI network.

face to face – Introduction

Exchange: People-to-People learning

The Situation Now
In a world that is shrinking fast, the relationship between the haves and have-nots gets more and more paradoxical especially in cities. On the one hand, all the economic and ecological formulas behind urban prosperity link together the lives of all city-dwellers in complicated webs of interdependence. Mr. Capitalist needs cheap labour and infrastructure. Mr. Poor Migrant needs a job and minimal, secure housing. And Mr. Public Official needs to juggle larger resource agendas and still get re-elected. The three may not understand each other very well, but their interdependence is one of the most fundamental but least understood imperatives of modern cities.

On the other hand, the gap which divides the haves from the have-nots is getting wider. As the process of development brings prosperity for some but further marginalizes the poor, the graphs on urban insecurity, violence and environmental deterioration are going up and up, while the breakdown of neighborhoods, communities and families is eroding the social fabric which makes cities decent places to live. Some talk about a crisis of governance, others about Armageddon but everybody agrees we've got a major mess

There are haves and have-nots at every scale: within communities, cities, countries and regions, and between the North and the South. In every context, it's generally the haves who take the prerogative to solve problems. In the case of cities, solutions put forward by the haves have not worked at all, but have made much harsher the have-nots' burden. While issues of infrastructure, real estate and investment get discussed in cities, the problems of the urban poor get neglected, causing those interdependent equations to get ever more lopsided and we're back to were we started from – the mess.
Why does this keep happening? The non-involvement of the have-nots in these kinds of solutions is critical. The thing is, there aren't any solutions that work for the poor. If there were, communities would already be using them. Most externally propagated alternatives are not providing the kind of solutions that were anticipated. Development interventions which sought to deal with a single issue no matter how well designed have not been able to deal with the reality that human beings have needs that are multi-faceted and interconnected needs which cannot be cubbyholed and resolved in discrete bits. Although very few resources get allocated to problems affecting the poor, even these get withdrawn when the poor fail to participate in change processes which either scare them away or seem useless.
For better or worse, though, the unruly, ungainly, unsinkable beast that is urbanisation is here to stay. We can count on cities expanding rapidly in the new millennium, and we can count on there being a lot more have-nots. In light of our past bumbling, this expansion presents a real challenge a challenge we have few tools to address.
So how do you shake off an age-old tradition which excludes the poor from participating in the exploration and testing of solutions to problems which affect their own lives? And how do you help poor communities to replace the isolation of despair with the kind of solidarity and stamina they need to work towards such solutions? Keep reading there's some good news coming up from the ground....

Horizontal Exchange: A Poor People's Pedagogy
Four and a half years ago, Lunghi Nzama got on a plane with a group from South Africa and flew to Bombay. It was the first time she'd ever left her country, the first time she'd been on an airplane. Lunghi is a community leader in a squatter settlement in Piesang River, outside Durban. In Bombay, she was welcomed enthusiastically by women who live in similarly impoverished but quite different conditions in pavement slums, accomplished women who have much to say about savings, about negotiating with cities for land and entitlements, about designing and building affordable houses about many things. Several of these women had even been in South Africa and know a lot about Lunghi's situation.
Until a few years ago, these kinds of exchange of poor people were rare. There are now increasing numbers of poor community groups moving around visiting each othe in their own cities and countries and in other countries. And an increasing number of their support organisations are hustling to make this possible. In some circles, eyebrows have gone up at this penetration into privileges that have traditionally been the preserve of professionals. But more and more development activists are welcoming this newly expanding and increasingly systematic horizontal exchange process as a new development tool a poor people's pedagogy.
Exchange is nothing new. Linking with like-minded people, across distances, is probably humanity's most natural impulse. There are exchanges of administrators, politicians, development professionals and NGO activists all the time, who move out of their own situations to learn, to meet peers and to fortify themselves with fresh ideas from elsewhere. But poverty is a relentless isolator, and puts formidable constraints on this kind of mobility and the linkages it engenders or at least reduces the sphere of mobility to a single lane or a slum which is nobody's idea of a larger world.

One of the persistent myths in developing countries is that the poor aren't improving their lot better because they lack skills to do so, and that if trained in skills, they will stop suffering and start prospering. As if the poor alone were responsible for complex field of economic and political causes and effects which landed them in an under-serviced squatter settlement! In fact, the issues which inhibit the poor from participating in the economy and getting access to resources go way beyond managerial and technical skills, and right back to that same old exclusion and bad planning by the haves. The poor do have skills, they have ideas, they have the seeds of the best solutions of all but what they don't have is the space and the support to explore and refine them.
That's where exchange learning comes in, as a development tool which helps people like Lunghi build capacities to deal with the root issues of poverty and homelessness, and to work out their own means to participate in decision-making which affects their lives locally, nationally and globally. In exchange, people are not being trained to do things. They decide themselves what to pick up and what to discard, by visiting others in the same boat. It is learning without an agenda or anybody else's atmosphere it's on-site and vital learning, direct from the source, unfiltered. Nobody's telling who what or when to learn.
Exchange has proven to be a useful and many-sided development tool. As an isolation-buster, confidence-booster, option-expander and network-builder, horizontal exchange is one of the most powerful antidotes to that old non-involvement problem. The exchange process represents a collective commitment of organisations of the poor to communicate with each other, to examine their problems, set priorities and explore solutions, to use each other as allies. Then to evaluate these solutions, refine them and spread them around.
These kinds of solutions and these explorations invariably mean working with other development actors with municipal and state governments, with NGOs and bilateral development agencies. Here, too, exchange is a powerful builder of networks and working alliances with sufficient scale and clout to strengthen representation of the poor in development debates and to expand the role the poor can play in bringing about equity and social justice. The large networks, which exchanges create, become a channel for the direct, rapid transfer of ideas, strategies, and options. In this way, solutions that are worked out locally become the building blocks for scaling up with global applicability.
These are big ideas, and may be hard to get your mind around. In the following pages, we'll try to bring these abstract concepts down to the ground, through the experiences and stories of several groups around the Asia and Africa regions who are working to create a process of community exchange through exploration and practice to turn a good idea into a systematic tool for people's development. Nobody we know has a clear-cut strategy yet. It's still in the R & D stage, but exchange is a tool that communities of the poor are the ones refining and using it. In this report, we're going to take a look at the ideas and people which have helped bring to life this new community development process, and look at some of the exposure experiences so far.

What is horizontal exchange?
It's hard to define such a living process with so much experimentation and so many flavors. But here are three definitions to start off with: one comes from a slum dweller, one from a development activist and one from an ancient Chinese book of wisdom...
1. No university has taught you to come from the village, to squat on land, to build your own house, to find work. Nobody gave you that training. But you have all that knowledge. If you depend on training, nothing will come to you. If you see somebody doing something, you can do it yourself. In our work, we do no training we learn from each other. If you go somewhere and tell your story to another person, they will learn from you: how you came, how you survived, how you got a house, how you talked to the city. That's exchange, that's how we learn, that's how we develop.
2. Exchange and exposure are terms we use to describe a variety of activities which all have in common poor people visiting poor people in other places in the same city or country or in other countries. Community leaders meet, talk, see what each other is doing and begin an education which allows them to explore the lives and situations of people in other communities, and to pick up any ideas which they think could be useful back home, in their own struggle for a better community. Exchange builds relationships of trust and partnership across distances, where teaching and learning from each other becomes natural almost automatic and where sharing things with each other strengthens self-worth. Exchange is the root strategy for education and mobilisation of the poor and by the poor.
3. A lake evaporates upward and thus gradually dries up; but when two lakes are joined, they do not dry up so readily, for one replenishes the other. It is the same in the field of knowledge. Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. In this way, learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught. (I-Ching, Hexagram 58, Tui.)

face to face – Part One

What actually happens? What exchanges are really like?

How this report works
It's not easy to write about the exchange of poor communities. Like the kind of learning which they promote, exchanges are many-sided and full of unexpected turns. All attempts to squeeze and knead and pummel that living material into a neat, theoretical framework are doomed. B might follow A, but C probably won't follow B until long after you want it to. And while D might follow C in Thailand, it'll surely precede it in South Africa. Community exchange is like that. It doesn't yield easily to logical tidiness. It squiggles, springs and resists shaping, it has a life all its own. But that doesn't mean there aren't some fundamental ideas which guide their use in a community process.
One way of looking at exchanges is to extract some of those fundamental ideas, and to use them one by one as a compass to guide us on a tour through this immense, richly complex, often contradictory and very human learning process.
As you flip through this report, you'll see that each two-page spread is headed by a number and an idea, which is briefly noted in big, bold letters, so you can't miss it. In each of these sections, we'll take that idea, examine it and illustrate it with anecdotes and pieces of wisdom drawn from the region's immense exchange experience. It's a way of circling and circling around the subject and looking at it from several different angles, and in many different lights. You can read from front-to-back or back to front it's up to you. The idea is each section adds a layer, and that hopefully all the layers will add up to an understanding which is many sided, cumulative, richer than the sum of its parts.
Beware of overlap and repetition many themes recur as we navigate this wide field of experience of community exposure. Our biggest problem is finding language and logic to match our convictions what works very well in the field may look shaky an inconsequential on paper, especially when written by impatient activists who hate to write. So as with horizontal learning, we'll just begin by practicing then keep circulating and sharpening through feedback.

What actually happens? What is it like?
Several months back, Ivy Anthony, a community leader from a savings scheme in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, went on an exchange visit to another savings scheme in Kwa Zulu Natal. The idea was to get help from a stronger group and pick up some strategies for dealing with some repayment problems they'd been having in her area an area which had gained the reputation of something of a problem child in the South African Homeless Federation. In Kwa Zulu Natal, however, she encountered problems with repayment that were as bad if not worse than her group's back home. There were other problems as well one leader had made off with the week's savings. Instead of enlightenment, she encountered mayhem, and found herself in the unexpected position of offering advice, even suggesting ways of getting the money back! A few days later, a newly confident Ivy returned to the Eastern Cape, with fresh energy to tackle their local problems. I don't know why everyone is making such a fuss about our repayment problems they're not as bad as I thought!
Exchanges take many forms. Some are like wake-up calls, some are highly ritualized, others are big events. Some work like museum visits, others like comfy drop-in visits between old chums. Some exposures have events that are carefully planned, all worked out, and others fly by in a chaotic whirl. Some encourage reflection, some galvanize to immediate action. But one thing that is common to all no matter what the protocol and that is that afterwards, when people go back home, or when they see off their visitors, they are a little bit different. Something has happened to shake things up something always happens.
Ivy didn't get what she bargained for in Kwa Zulu Natal, but she did get something. And that something set her work back home a clear step ahead of where it had been before she left. It's often like that with exposure, where going somewhere else someplace very different can work on a mind that has got stuck like a good healthy thwack!
Some experiences are like that. You can be told all about it, you can be shown the pictures and have it explained to you over and over again, in the greatest of detail, and you can say Yes, yes, I understand! But often times, it's not until you actually go there and see that thing yourself, and experience it with your own five senses that you really get it that thwack. This is something we've all experienced, and in exchange and exposure, that thwack is the most sought-after sensation of all, the coveted blow that starts loosening up fixed ideas, shaking rusty gears loose so they can start turning again. Exposure participants and exposure supporters become collectors of and connoisseurs of that thwack.
This is especially so the first time out. After a while, of course, if you come a second time and a third, that sense of shock diminishes and you progress to other insights, to deeper levels of understanding and the life of an exchange relationship moves ahead. You progress from being shocked by something to understanding it, and from comparing that situation to your own to having ideas to improve it. Each place provides its own unique thwack, and it's own say of aiming it, to help visitors open up room for the next, more important part, which is the learning.

A note about cost (or is it about thrift?)
For many, the cost of exchange is worrisome. Funding institutions compare exchange costs with things like constructing housing or toilets or installing water pumps. Instead of squandering on exchanges, many groups are asked, why not use that money to build 50 houses? The thing is, you have to look at how the poor in different countries get access to shelter and basic amenities: if building their capacities to reach that goal is the focus of an intervention at local or global levels then you certainly get your money's worth with exchange. Besides which, we are very greedy instead of welfare houses for fifty, we want tenure for thousands.
Anyway, costs are relative. We've estimated that bringing a team of poor people to another country and supporting training which they will take home and use costs less than flying in a single highly-paid expert to document a project. And the exchange process belongs to people they adapt and re-shape it to build their organisations and develop their alternatives. It's up to donor organisations to choose which is more effective in the long run.
Exchange isn't cheap, but it can be managed frugally. Because funds for exchange are limited, most groups have to stretch those resources as far as possible, and this turns communities back onto their native resourcefulness. Here are a few notes from the thrift and spendthrift files...

Bombay Bogota Exchange
The brief exchange between pavement dwellers in Mahila Milan in Bombay, India and community women with Fede Vivienda, in Bogota, Colombia, which began and ended in 1990, strikes a good contrast between a thrifty people's model for running exchanges and a more traditional NGO model, which is not so thrifty. Here's how one worker from SPARC (MM's NGO partner) describes it:

We had about $5,000 to host the Colombians. That was our first time organising a big exchange visit like this and we tried to stretch this collective opportunity to the maximum. So we brought along as many people as possible, we all slept in big rooms together, and we took the visitors to see work in other cities not just to Bombay. And we stretched the food budget for five people to feed 25 people. But Bogota's attitude was very different: If NGOs go to the best hotel, why shouldn't we take the communities there also? And so when we went to Bogota, we were treated like royalty! All the best places, the very best food everything was perfect! And they used up all the money and over-spent the budget, while we stretched our money and even used it to do follow-ups internally. As the years went by, this frugality became habitual in our exchanges we don't tend to spend lots and lots of money, but just cover expenses.

Thailand Cost story
Community networks in Thailand all get a small budget from the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) for national exchanges, which each network decides how to use. Those budgets are stretched far, with no per-diems, no frills, and minimum travel costs.

A few months back, members of Bangkok's Under-bridge Dwellers Federation decided to visit Uteradit, where word had it that eight families were building houses together at the unheard of cost of 40,000 Baht. So cheap! The under-bridgers were in the midst of planning their own houses, which they would soon be building on government-provided plots, and were keen to see how others could build so cheaply. So with a tiny purse from the exchange coffers, they hired a bus, traveling by night to save on hotel costs in Uteradit. They carried food and utensils with them, so they could cook along the way and avoid restaurant bills. When they arrived in the morning, they bathed and changed clothes in a temple, cooked their rice porridge and then spent the day in the community, pitching in on the construction site and seeing what's what. They returned to Bangkok that evening, traveling by night again to save hotel costs. The trip's only cost was bus hire about 5,000 Baht a day!

Community leaders in the Nakhon Sawan Network have also begun bringing along their own utensils and cooking meals along the way when they travel to see projects in other provinces. Why? It's cheaper, it's more delicious and we can invite our hosts to join us!

1. To a garbage dump (Visit to Payatas)
Who could forget his first visit to the sprawling settlements which encircle the smoking, towering, stinking mountain of garbage at Payatas, in the Philippines? Or to the federation of savings collectives which has become the Philippines Homeless People's Federation's senior sister? Here are some first-hand accounts from a team of community members from Bicol, on their first exposure to Payatas, back in 1996.
Miloy: I was already worried, right from the start my first time traveling to Manila from the province. I approached some people whom I thought wouldn't fool me. They directed me to the jeepneys going to Payatas. Reaching Payatas, I wondered what kind of place this is! There was garbage all over the place. Someone directed me to the Parish. I tried looking around and saw the sign Scavengers' Savings Association on the door.
Dora: I was treated like a member of the family. Where I stayed, water was a big problem. The pump there is good only to fill one pail for taking a bath. Nothing would come out afterwards. So, if you need to go to the convenience room, it would be very difficult.
Virgie: We visited the dumpsite and even did scavenging ourselves. One woman got angry with us since the system is that dump-trucks are already negotiated for, even before they arrive. Anyway, we got the right timing when one truck arrived loaded with retaso (cloth scraps) which you can made into pillows. We started picking them up, then another got angry. Covering our nose is not allowed here because they feel insulted, that's what I observed.
Lina: Mang Boy Awid toured us around. We covered practically all the streets of Payatas! We visited some families, members of the savings program. People are really united in savings they were even remitting their savings in coins! The person in the savings office was a Bicolana too. I worked with her three times and she showed me filling out records, receiving savings remittances, and issuing receipts. In Bicol, I'm a market vendor. The other vendors asked me about the real score of the savings program in Payatas. I told them you may not believe it at once, but what comes in and out daily is about 100,000 Pesos! In fact one day savings was about 114,000 Pesos, and what went out in loans was about 83,000 Pesos. There are days when loans are bigger than savings.
Miloy: I told my colleagues in the Tricycle Drivers' Association to join the savings. I told them that modesty aside somebody in Payatas bought a jeepney out of his savings. Persistence is all it takes. There in Payatas they have answers to their necessities due to savings. It might be dirty and smelly in Payatas and houses may just be small and makeshift, but they are complete with appliances.
Tita: For me, it is good to go there actually. It makes a difference seeing the actual instead of just hearing stories. If a speaker talks about something, you would still be wondering if it is really so, while if you personally see it, you will not have any qualms.

2. To a tin shack (Lamontville)
And in South Africa? In the South African federation, there is no exchange visit, no meeting and no gathering in no matter how inhospitable a situation without singing. Here are one observer's thoughts about the power of these songs, from an exchange visit to a squatter settlement just outside Durban:
The poor in South Africa have suffered generations of poverty and homelessness, centuries of being forced into the slavery of bonded work and divided by color, thought and creed. But their communities were not destroyed by apartheid and they are now being built and strengthened around fighting for hoses, land finance through housing savings schemes. The enormous volume of exchange visits within the South African Homeless People's Federation involve many activities and take many forms, but one element thing that is always there is song.
The clouds darkened and bolts of lightning cracked the sky. We were directed to the top of the hill, where a large shack doubles as church and community hall. Over fifty women and men were waiting for us quietly in the half light, but broke into energetic song as soon as we entered. The elder women ululated and shook outstretched hands so their beads rattled. Their song marshaled other members of the community, and the gathering swelled to over 100 people.
The meeting was charged with spontaneous enthusiasm. Every speaker was heralded with Federation slogans, shouted so loudly that it drowned out the rattle of rain on the corrugated iron roof. Speeches were punctuated with wonderful songs, and songs expanded into toyi-toyi, which shook that little shack to the rafters. Like all groups in the South African federation, members of Lamontville's savings scheme have made up their own lyrics and set them to familiar tunes.
These women in Lamontville live in their language. It's not information that their words convey, it's authentic experience. Their words play, they celebrate life, they speak in the pure poetry of their own history. Even their most heartrendingly sad hymns are an affirmation of the wonder of being alive. We sat singing, swaying and clapping as the women danced. Here was liberated language, breaking all the rules. In that shack on the hill, with the wind howling and the rain pelting down we recaptured music, gestures, longings, dreams.
To those in power, these kinds of dreams are problematic, even dangerous, since it is in the nature of dreams that they can never be guaranteed by bureaucrats, bonded by bankers or transformed into commodities by developers. The songs of the women in Lamontville, like all the savings schemes, are made to create direct communication, reciprocal recognition by all members of this national collective. The sun went down, but the singing and dancing continued. This was poetry and development in practice.

3. To a sidewalk: (Visiting Mahila Milan in Byculla)
And who can forget her first trip into India into Bombay, it's teeming mercantile capitol, and into Byculla, right in the gritty, overcrowded, clamorous heart of the city? For the connoisseur of the THWACK, India has immense and boundless shock value. Here are some telegraphic impressions from a Thai visitor to the Mahila Milan 's Area Resource Centre at Byculla:
First the street kids pick you up at the airport in their Citibank-donated taxi. They are grown up now, and driving so fast, nothing to do with rules!
Collecting daily savings with Shehnaz, in the early morning. People on her street live in 3-square metre bed-houses on the street. The feet of sleeping people stick out of these tiny shelters. Men bathe in the gutter, babies play under parked taxis and women roll out chapattis and pound spices. And that food! They way they mash it all together on a steel plate, and scoop it up with their hand. Shit even on the sidewalks Shehnaz says, Watch out for those bombs!
How can people survive like this! We've seen the pictures, we've heard the stories, we've read the statistics, but nothing nothing! can prepare us for the shock of Byculla, of Bombay, of India! Even tough people like us, who live and work in poor communities are shocked when they come here. In Thailand, we get awed by Klong Toey, Thailand's largest slum, with 6,000 families. That's nothing at all in Bombay. Jockin explains about federating the RSDF or doing the survey, and everything is reckoned in hundreds of workers, thousands of families, millions of poor people! The scale of everything here is staggering, the scale of filth, the scale of poverty.
But underneath all this, there is this women's savings collective, this federation which has got so much going building thousands of houses, hundreds of toilets, saving millions of rupees. It's a little mechanism in all this big scale, but it's working! It's healthy, alive, growing.
Book keeping back in the Byculla office, in the garage out behind an old municipal dispensary. So many people here, all in different groups do different things, all sitting on the floor in one small room making payments, taking loans, counting money, filling ledgers, rubbing feet, combing hair, gossiping, arguing, sleeping. The phone rings all the time. Sadak Chaap kids wrestle outside, women slap each other on the back. Glasses of sweet tea are handed around. Women pavement dwellers come and go with so much confidence it's so plain to see. This is their place you can feel it, it's not like the offices you visit in other projects these women are the ones asking you questions, Do you have savings schemes in your country?

4. To a sewer (an exchange to OPP)
Or to the vast katchi abadi of Orangi, in Karachi, Pakistan a slum that is bigger than most cities, where the most effective, most practical, most unifying link between a million poor families is nothing abstract like solidarity or human tenderness but sewage!
Exposure visits to the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) follow a little more structured model than the Indian or African visits. Probably because the whole project, as it progresses, has been used for a long time as a living training ground for extending the model of community managed sanitation to other settlements, other cities and other parts of Asia. Hundreds and thousands of people have come here for specific training in building sewers, organising lanes, digging manholes. And so the training has been systematized. The OPP staff, which combines technical people and social organizers, from both the communities and from the professions, have got it down to a science.
Visitors are first sat down and given a formal presentation about OPP's work, in the training centre, richly illustrated with before and after slides. The OPP's concept is very simple: off-site infrastructure is done by the government, and on-site infrastructure is developed, built and paid for by the communities with assistance from OPP. Engineers who come say Impossible! Communities have no skills! NGOs say They cannot do it! and community people say We're too poor! How can we afford to invest in this? This is cruelty!
After the presentation, they are sent out into the lanes of Orangi with someone to meet the people who have done this work. This lane has laid its own sewage system, it has built its own water supply. If you would like to talk to anybody you can. So people come out, they bring out their chairs or their beds and spread them out in the lane, and everyone sits down and discusses. It is here that visitors learn how pipes link all these million families small pipes in hundreds of small lanes connecting to secondary drains, then to main drains, and at the edge of Orangi to the municipal trunk sewers. And all along the way, the vital issues are level, slope, pipe diameter, sewerage flow. They learn how all these pipes are the basis of organising their settlements, improving their lives and health, consolidating their right to stay. Skepticism melts away. And what all these proud sewer-builders tell them is, You know, we've done this the OPP has only been a pain in all this.

face to face Part 2:

Exchanges in the Asian / African network
Linking is humanity's natural impulse, its common destiny. But the ties that bind people around the world are not merely technological or commercial. They are the powerful chords of the heart. (Erla Zwingle, Global Culture, National Geographic, August, 1999)
The imagery for people's development processes is moving out of the army and into the kitchen... the words are no longer control and train and mobilize, but mix, blend, simmer and shake!

Developing a regional Chess board
If you look around poor communities in Asia today, there's an awful lot going on learning, building, innovating, negotiating moving forward in a thousand ways. No need to be modest Asian grassroots organisations are on the cutting edge of people-driven solutions and represent a powerful pool of skills and expertise. This is something we know now, but fifteen years ago, there was also a lot going on, but nobody knew much about it, all those struggles were isolated, as though locked away in separate cupboards.
That's where horizontal exchange comes in. When some solution seems to work in one place, horizontal exchange creates opportunities for more communities to learn about it and piggy-back on the experience, so good ideas spread around. Usually this means community leaders (and sometimes government officials) come to get hands-on training and then take the message back home and to other cities.
The more these national groups get exposed to regional processes, the more you build a regional mechanism for diffusing innovation, by and for people, directly. A growing number of grassroots groups in the Asian region and their supporters have embraced this form of direct, experiential learning, and over the past fifteen years, the exposure process has mushroomed in scale, matured in focus and expanded in variety. Exchange is now an inherent feature of how the regional network operates, and how the poor learn.
As more and more exchanges are organised within the region, an increasing and increasingly varied core of expertise comes out of those exchanges. If one settlement in India, for example, has grappled with a serious infrastructure problem, there is your resource for other communities to learn from. Another settlement which has navigated a bumpy negotiation for alternative land becomes another resource. The Asian network now has a set of core organisations which operate as resource team, in which everyone knows each other, understands each other's strengths and weaknesses and knows how best to combine and work together. The investment stays within communities and within the region it's available, affordable, there's a better language and cultural fit.
This resource pool provides a healthy counterbalance to a development paradigm which keeps sending international experts over to tell communities what to do, and which still holds considerable sway over Asian development and development resources. In that model, experts come in, innovate and then go away, taking the learning with them. In the exchange model, learning stays within communities because the vehicle is people, who are rooted in their local process and who do not go away.
One of the most powerful aspects of exchange is that it expands your repertoire of options you don't have to have it happen in your own back yard any more. People don't have to work out all their systems by themselves they can import that process to help them if they need to. And that's what the larger pool offers. Let's take a brief, backward look at a few of the important milestones in the development of aregional exchange process:

Chronology

1985 88
1985: Indian exposure trip to South India: First grant to take communities to other areas in India (from Selavip). Women pavement dwellers from Byculla Mahila Milan go to Kerala and Madras, where they look at building materials and projects which don't work for the poor. Before this trip, local exchanges between communities within Bombay were going strong and local consolidation through local exchange had already begun. This first inside-India exchange is so successful that the MM/NSDF/SPARC alliance begins featuring exchanges in their process and starts including budgets for exchange in funding proposals. It helps legitimize a new activity when it is written in like this, to highlight the value of exchange as a training experience.
Father Jorge Anzorena: Many trace the genesis of the community exposure idea to this early champion of direct, people-to-people learning, who said Why should professionals like me have a monopoly on all this vast experience, while the poor are stuck in their settlements? Why shouldn't they, with such hunger to improve their lives, also be able to travel, to see the best of Asia's development? And so begins the exchange experiment. With some very modest funds from Selavip, he begins helping set up and support some exploratory grassroots exchanges.

Early 1989
Women's Regional Savings and Credit Meeting in Bombay: Grassroots women leaders from 10 Asian countries and 8 Indian cities gather for a week in March, 1989, and form a grassroots women's network. Organised by SPARC and hosted by pavement dwellers in Mahila Milan, the meeting is a first on many fronts: the first exchange of poor women involved in savings and credit, the first regional acknowledgment of savings and credit as one of the most important community mobilising tools, the first to produce a meeting report composed entirely of carefully transcribed and translated words from the women themselves. This meeting sets the pattern of what future exchanges will look like: a parallel meeting of local federations is held, Mahila Milan gets the international visitors to inaugurate housing sites at Mankhurd and Railway slums, takes them all to meet their government officials, gets them to talk to the Housing Secretary about the role of women, and does everything very frugally everybody sleeps in big hall together and eats meals prepared by the communities. All these are elements of exchanges which later get very defined.
First all-Thailand Slum Census is carried out by the Human Settlements Foundation (NGO). Though not very accurate or very participatory, this is the first attempt to take a comprehensive look at slums in 27 cities outside Bangkok, at a time when the focus is still on rural development and few initiatives in these cities deal with problems of urban poverty and housing. The survey leads to community organising work in southern Thailand, and to the first series of exchanges between community leaders in Sonkhla and Bangkok.

Later 1989
June 1989: Asian People's Dialogue on Housing and Shelter in Seoul, Korea brings together grassroots community leaders and NGO representatives from 11 countries. A first in Asia 100 poor people from 11 countries together! This is one of the most important milestones of the regional exchange process and for many professionals marks a shift to supporting a learning process that really belonged to poor people themselves. Held in conjunction with a fact-finding mission focusing on evictions in Seoul for the Asian Games, the meeting clearly shows that Asia's poor have many concerns in common and much to learn from each other. Years later, people still talk about the magic and solidarity at this meeting, and about the telepathic understanding among community leaders despite translation problems.
International workshop-style meetings aren't usually designed for the poor, who can be intimidated by their atmosphere and style of debate. In Seoul, the poor are the main actors and their settlements are the main venue. Sessions take place in slums around Seoul, some facing eviction crises. People stay in slums and talk about all aspects of their lives houses, incomes, jobs, kids, basic services even religion! This is a new concept for a workshop and ends with the establishment of a network of Asian grassroots community collectives. A second Dialogue is held in Bangkok, right after the meeting in Seoul, to include the South Africans, who weren't given Korean visas.
Asian Coalition for Housing Rights officially formed at the Seoul meeting, holds it's first general meeting and resolves to support exchange of grassroots groups.
First Regional Exchange Funding Proposal flops Right after Seoul, ACHR works out and sends to donors US$200,000 proposal to support regional exchanges, but nobody will fund it. It's hard to say whether this is because we are ineffective in communicating or because donors are afraid to invest in a new process which promises no concrete outputs and which their colleagues can easily label as Developmental tourism for Asian slum dwellers. But the plan to undertake a regional exchange process systematically is not abandoned!

1990
Vietnam Exchanges Begin with a workshop on participatory settlement development in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing together grassroots leaders from Vietnam, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, and Asian professionals. A community-managed pilot housing project in canal side settlements is set up. This is one of the first times that local officials and professionals are invited by local community leaders (not the other way around!), and one of the first times the Asian network of professionals is on hand to assist both community leaders and authorities. Exchanges to India, Thailand and Sri Lanka follow.
Bombay Bogota Exchange: The brief exchange between Bombay and Bogota is one of the first systematic international exchange programmes after Seoul. Homeless International (HI) and SPARC design this first exchange, part of the Women's Shelter Network, which brings together Mahila Milan in India and community women through Fede Vivienda in Colombia. HI is one of the few funders to stick out it's neck and risk supporting community exchange before it is fashionable or even thought legitimate. Later on, HI will become a committed partner of exchange programmes between India, Thailand, South Africa and Cambodia.
The exchange is only one trip to Bogota and one to Bombay. The two groups don't mesh and the relationship ends there, but a lot of important learning comes out of that process: that men and women both have to be involved, that support organisations have to take part in and believe in the exchange learning process, that exchange cannot be treated as a project add-on, that the role of interpreter is very important. When the Bogota group comes to India, the Indians take them to Madras and Bangalore, utilize their presence to negotiate. Since 1985, the MM/NSDF/SPARC alliance had already begun to do these things locally and nationally. This international exchange helps everyone look at what is needed in an international intervention.
Sri Lanka Women's Bank is formed: An set of experimental women's savings groups in areas around Sri Lanka come together to form Women's Bank (Kantha Sahayaka Sewaya) to gain solidarity, pool savings and create a capital fund for micro-enterprise loans. From the beginning, an intense programme of exchanges between poor community women all over the country helps extend the bank, enabling women to meet, share experiences and jointly solve problems.

1991
1991: People's Dialogue on Land and Shelter Workshop organized by the Catholic Development Agency, is held in Broederstroom, South Africa, on the eve of South African independence. With the idea of drafting a policy on urban poverty for the ANC government, the workshop brings together community leaders from 150 squatter leaders from all over South Africa the first ever such meeting. Asian, Latin American and African shelter NGOs and CBOs send delegates. The meeting is divided: half say there is no need for the poor to organize themselves since the incoming ANC government will solve all social and economic problems. The other half say no way! Democracy will only open space for poor people to contest resources and this they can only do if they are organized. Jockin from NSDF in India says India has had independence for 50 years and all sorts of wonderful pro-poor policies, but people are still living in slums. It is agreed that a programme of church-sponsored community exchanges will begin, to link interested communities into a network.
People's Dialogue Formed: After the Broederstroom meeting, People's Dialogue (PD) is established as an NGO to help set up and maintain an exchange-driven network of urban poor groups. About 40 settlements join and funds are secured from Misereor, thanks to the vision of Gregor Meerpohl (Misereor) and Peter Templeton (Catholic Welfare and Development) for local and international exchanges. International exchanges, though, are delayed until a local initiative has emerged.
December 1991: Joel's trip to Asia: Immediately after Broederstroom, PD's director Joel Bolnick is invited on an exposure whirlwind of Asian groups in the ACHR network. Visits Hong Kong (SOCO), Philippines (Pagtambayayong, Freedom to Build, COPE), Thailand (ACHR, HSF and some federations), Pakistan (OPP) and India (SPARC). The long partnership between India and SA dates to this visit, where Joel finds a logical partner organisation in SPARC, because of its alignment with people's movements, emphasis on partnership, prioritizing the poorest, women, savings, participation.
India SA exchange starts with first exploratory visits by NSDF/SPARC to SA. February 1992 is the first real India to SA exchange. Thereafter, the groups in the network supported by People's Dialogue start to save, but are not yet a federation. In June 1992 the first SA to India exchange. In India, the South Africans are exposed to community enumeration, daily saving, life-size house-modeling, and several other tools for the first time, all of which they later make their own and pass on through exchanges to federations in other countries in Africa.

1992 1994
1992: Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) is set up in Thailand with a revolving loan fund for the urban poor to improve living conditions and increase organisational capacity of poor communities through savings and credit, housing and livelihood loans and the formation of community networks at city, provincial and national levels. In coming years, these networks will play an increasingly central role in UCDO programmes. Exchange becomes network's principle tool of information transfer and expansion. First Thailand India exchanges, between Thai community networks and MM/NSDF in India follow.
Vietnam Exchanges: to and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Thailand some of the first exchange visits to experiment with mixed teams of community leaders, NGO and government officials who travel together.
SA links to Namibia: Namibians from the Credit Union League host exchange visits from SA. In 1993, Lalith Lankatilleke and PD help establish Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG), a service organization providing technical skills to poor communities. Exchanges between NHAG and PD begin.
1993: TAP Programme established: A number of country-to-country exchanges after the Seoul meeting helps grassroots groups to develop the capacity to host and train their Asian neighbors. This process is formalized into the DFID-supported ACHR Training and Advisory Programme (TAP), based on a few key assumptions:
á Asian grassroots organisations in the ACHR network are on the cutting edge of people-defined solutions and represent a powerful but unacknowledged resource

While international agencies keep sending in short-term consultants to tell them what to do, these groups continue to be firmly rooted in local process.

Poor communities can dialogue and collaborate with all the development actors, and their strongest tool is not protest, but alternative solutions.
TAP begins looking around the region at programmes that work for the poor and facilitates visits of community leaders, NGOs and officials involved in these programmes to other cities and countries to advocate these strategies. In it's first six years, TAP supports 120 international exposures.
1993: Regional Links to Cambodia: Urban Sector Group (USG) is established during a city-wide workshop on urban poverty in Phnom Penh. NSDF/MMM help conduct enumeration in the city's largest squatter area and start savings groups. Cambodian community leaders later visit Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa.
1993: Links to Nepal: First ACHR links with poor communities and professionals in Kathmandu Nepal. Later Lumanti is established as local NGO and begins work in squatter areas.
1993: Links with Orangi Pilot Project, Pakistan: Ongoing involvement in regional exchanges. OPP began with the assumption that poor people are not foolish but great masters of the art of survival, and are trying hard to improve their lives. But they are not getting much help or support. On the contrary, they are at times harassed. There is a need for social guidance, technical guidance, and economic support. (OPP founder, Dr. Akhtar Khan)
1994: uMfelandaWonye (South African Homeless People's Federation) is formally launched. National and regional leaders are selected. Later, the federation-linked uTshani Fund is established in South Africa.
1994: Links to Lao: Thai and Indian community members visit canal settlements in Vientiane, Lao PDR, help starting savings and credit groups and discuss solutions to drainage problems, working with UNCHS/CDF project.
1994: Community Workshop in Colombo, Sri Lanka: hosted by Women's Bank and Sevanatha (NGO), with mixed community/NGO teams from 8 Asian countries and South Africa, focuses on community action planning, savings and credit, community contracts for infrastructure and sanitation.

1995 1997
Links to Zimbabwe (1995): The South African Federation begins working with slumdwellers around Victoria Falls. Savings schemes are established, enumeration conducted, exchanges begin.
1995 1996 Kenya South Africa Exchanges: The concept of savings and federation is introduced to the settlements of Nairobi, and helps launch a grassroots movement called Muungano Wa Wanavijiji in Nairobi. Kituo Cha Sheria (NGO) acts as a link between Kenyans and the SA/PD alliance.
1995 Thai Network Expansion: Expansion of community networks in Songkhla, Chiang Mai and Northeast lead to increasing numbers of national and local exchanges, for learning, transfer and assistance. UCDO begins moving from a credit-service delivery approach to a network style of management. The DANCED Environmental Improvement Programme begins within UCDO in 1996, in which networks throughout the country take greater role in developing, implementing, monitoring and disseminating the environmental projects going on. DANCED helps the exchange process link with existing NGOs, new communities, provincial and municipal officials.
October 1995: Workshop in Japan: Sri Lanka, Philippines, Thailand and India focuses on how to negotiate with local authorities and sparks a series of exchanges between members of the Buraku Liberation League (a minority in Japan) and the South Korean squatter settlements.
1995: South African Minister of Land Affairs, Derek Hanekom, visits NSDF/MM in Bombay, along with leaders from the SA federation.
May 1996: Shack Dwellers International (SDI) is formed in South Africa, when grassroots groups from Asia, Africa and South America come together to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the South African federation. In coming years, through exchange visits, exhibitions, meetings and intensifying collaborations, SDI will bring together hundreds of thousands of poor women and men, creating a far-flung solidarity and enabling a rapid transfer of development knowledge, organisational skills and people's own resources from one situation of urban poverty to another. The SDI acronym is convertibleÑ in Asia we call it Slum Dwellers International and in Africa, it's Shack Dwellers International.
1997: Zimbabwe Federation is born after savings schemes are extended to Harare. Bethi Chitekwe comes on as NGO support person, setting up Zimbabwe Dialogue on Shelter.
1997: Philippines joins exchange process. Father Norberto (Parish Priest in Payatas, one of Manila's largest slum areas) visits NSDF/MM in India. Later that year, Jockin and Joel visit Payatas. The link helps begin to transform a large micro-credit project into a federation linking savings with land and housing issues.
1997: Nepal joins Asian exchange process, exchanges with India, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
1997: Model House Exhibition in Cambodia: The Squatter and Urban Poor Federation (SUPF) showcases their recent city-wide slum survey (379 settlements), and affordable house types (one wood, one brick) municipal and national governments attend, along with CBO/NGO teams from India, Thailand and South Africa. The city took notice! This first, big public event galvanizes the federation and leads to several integrated exposure trips with community leaders and local officials to India and Thailand, and paves the way for the federation's first housing project in partnershhip with government.

1998 1999
First community enumerations in Zimbabwe: In Africa, the South Africans were the first to ritualize community shack-counting and enumeration, which they were first exposed to on pavements in Bombay in 1992. SA shack dwellers help conduct enumerations in Harare squatter settlements Dzivareskwa and Hatcliff extension. Later, Victoria Falls federation uses another survey in Chinotimba Township to revitalise savings schemes, mobilise new members and engage the local council in negotiations for land. Community leaders from SA, Namibia and Kenya came help. Direct exchange links between federations in Namibia, Kenya and Zimbabwe established.
Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG) joins the federation model and becomes the equivalent of SPARC / People's Dialogue, working in alliance with the new Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia.
September 1998: First Assembly of the Philippines Homeless People's Federation held in Payatas, Quezon City, bringing together over 1,000 local members and 200 visiting members from across the Philippines. Hosted by the Payatas Scavenger's Federation, meeting focuses on land acquisition and savings. The new federation's first big jamboree marks a shift in VMSDFI's role from microcredit service provider to federation support partner. Leads to first city-to-city exchanges in Philippines between savings groups in Payatas, Cebu, Iloilo and General Santos.
December, 1998 Zimbabwe Federation is formally launched: 120 Zimbabwean shack-dwellers meet in Harare, along with slum dwellers from India, Cambodia, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Senegal for 4-day meeting / launching party for the new Zimbabwe federation. A year earlier, there were only 5 saving schemes, now there are 50 all over the country. Meeting is covered by radio, TV and press. Housing Minister attends, pledges Zim$ 25 million to a special Urban Poor Loan Fund.
January 1999: First Philippines Indonesia exchange: Waste-pickers from Payatas Scavengers Federation visit scavenger communities in Bantar Gebang, Jakarta.
March 1999: First Senegal SA Exchange: Women in the Senegal Savings and Loan Network in Dakar, Senegal visit SAHPF to look at affordable house design, settlement layout, brick-making, construction and to compare lending experiences.
May 1999: Formal launch of the Namibian Federation (Twahangana): following an earlier house model exhibition at Freedom Land, enumeration of shack-dwellers in Windhoek and public presentation of survey results to the city all assisted by India, SA and NHAG. This event comes after several years of exchanges between Namibia and SA which helped guide the process from a service delivery approach to a federation of daily savings collectives.
June 1999: Zimbabwe Model House Exhibition: Held at the end of an enumeration in Mbare, with help from the South Africans. Teams from India, SA, Senegal, Namibia attend, along with bus-loads of Zimbabwean federation members. Now 140 savings schemes in the Zimbabwe federation, with 18,000 members. Exhibition results in Victoria Falls groups being allocated 400 plots by the government.
Shack Dwellers International (SDI) is formally established, with federations in 14 countries in three continents.
October 1999: Free State Federation (South Africa) starts savings schemes across the border in Lesotho.
June 6, 1999 Inauguration of Women's Development Bank Federation in Colombo new women's federation of savings groups. Join exchange process with trips to India, Cambodia and Nepal.
October 1999 Model house exhibition in Nepal held to launch the new Women's Savings Federation (Nepal Mahila Ekta Samaj) and coincide with CITYNET meeting of Asian mayors in Kathmandu. over 1,000 local women and SDI delegates from India, Thailand, Cambodia and Sri Lanka join. Exchanges with MM/NSDF in India helped develop savings groups in Nepalese squatter settlements and now direct links are established with MM/NSDF teams in Kanpur and Lucknow.face to face Part 3:

People Decide what to learn, A Poor People's Pedagogy
A Poor People's Pedagogy:

The Venue: Our settlements

The Agenda: Our needs, our ideas

The Schedule: Our timing, our rhythms

The Atmosphere: Our world
Who decides what the poor need, or what's useful to them? How do you buck that old tradition which excludes the poor from participating and spark off a process in which the poor are the creators of development which affects them? These are haunting questions for those who want to build and support real participation, and a real community process not the sham kind.
Letting people decide sounds simple enough. But in a development scene characterized by interventions in poor communities more busy culturing obedience than independence, that's easier said than done. Feed your baby this way! Build your house like that! Shout at the government like this! There are so many people interfering in the lives of the poor, in so many ways, that one community leader likens it to having two different barbers cut the sides of your hair, another to shave the back, and still another to slice off the front so in the end you're head is all in tufts and patchwork!
Today's social and economic structures are largely determined by who teaches who what, how and when. And the kind of teaching that's on offer to the poor nowadays isn't doing much to solve their problems and it certainly doesn't belong to them (back to the barber...).
If poor communities are going to participate centrally in development processes which affect them, there has to be a process of education in organisation and mobilisation to prepare them. When they face a problem, they need to understand that problem and then examine all the available options in the context of their own lives and of the larger social environment. This strategy is based on the conviction that those who face the problems are the best judges of whether a given solution is effective or not. And this means building capacities, developing skills and lots of learning.

politics with a small p . . .
When the poor do obtain resources, it's not just because they deserve it. It's because of a sustained mobilization, which is a political process with a small p. Knowing what you need does not automatically give you the resources to fulfill that need. A lot of people have to want the same thing in order for the resources to flow and for the policies to change. So the learning has to encompass how to make demands, what to demand and how to sustain the pressure.
But poor people aren't fools they know very well when they can exercise control and when they can't, and often seek ways of learning in which they can control the process. People already have learning systems of their own, and these have a certain character a character which is based on a critical consciousness about what works for them and what doesn't. Initially, the character of that learning may be rather crude even dysfunctional but gradually, it develops into a complete process, if supported.
Exchange learning is an alternative an alternative which acknowledges that poor people have a right to determine what's good for them. On exchanges, people aren't being told that this or that is good for them, the curriculum isn't all worked out. People themselves decide what to pick up and what to discard from the things they see others doing. It's learning according to their own needs, learning without anybody else's agenda.
And there is a qualitative difference between learning from peer exchanges and formal training. When you see ideas being put into practice by people as poor as you, it's powerful, it makes you believe it might really work. You're seeing possibilities which did not come from an expert or from a text book. This is the best kind of training, when the question is equipping communities to deal with the state and to negotiate on issues such a land, infrastructure or housing finance. Through exchange with other similarly placed groups, communities begin to understand the political dimensions behind these issues.
When poor women, for example, examine their priorities, they are clear what is fundamentally needed secure land, decent houses, basic services, employment opportunities, access to credit. When they see evidence that change is possible in those areas, they become committed to learning how to make that happen, even if it takes a very long time. And sometimes you have to travel a ways to find that kind of evidence. Horizontal exchanges, which create a large pool of exchange partners, expands the insights available to community groups for such understanding.
In exchanges, nobody ever feels solely responsible for anybody's else's welfare or happiness or intellectual evolution. Each one is pretty much responsible for his or her own education. In that sense, the quality of exchange learning is very mature: I'm not responsible to educate you, I'm responsible to share what I'm doing. It's your responsibility to pick it up, argue about it, discuss it, or discard it, share it, take it home and use it. The exchange process is carving out and refining a strategy in which the same process which teaches communities to participate in change forms the basis of the solutions which those communities can then pass on to others and present to the state.
Horizontal learning through exchange is one of the key tools people can use to build a poor people's agenda. Communities should feel that spaces are available for them to do these things vibrantly and to expect and demand their larger voluntary and government supporters to do things that will facilitate that. This is a big conceptual leap.
SA India Exchange: There is still an assumption that poor communities have no real knowledge or skills, no capacity to determine their own priorities, identify their needs and find ways to resolve them. And that there is always a need for an external agent a professional, an academic, a government official, a financier, an architect to come and find solutions for people's poverty. The real power of the exchange between South Africa and India and between poor communities in the same country is that the learning process is a horizontal one. Poor people teach poor people how to identify priorities and resolve their particular resource needs. So at the same time that the product is being achieved and the goal is being reached, people are finding ways to solve their own problems. They are not being put into a situation where their dependency on external agents is being reinforced. In fact, it's liberating because people in the very same context as themselves are showing them answers, rather than having those answers shown to them by professionals.
Women in exchange

Whenever women come together as a group something will happen definitely! When women are the vehicle, you can change culture. Samina, Byculla MM
The poor are now, and will continue to be, the major producers of housing. And amongst the poor, most often it's women who design, build and defend all that housing stock. Communities rarely acknowledge this, though, and poor women themselves seldom feel proud of their creations. Almost all women living on the pavements in Bombay, for instance, have built their own houses. But years ago, when asked about this aspect of their lives, they laughed, What? This old heap of bamboo and plastic?
Here's the word from SPARC in India: If you want to make qualitative change, women have to be in on it. For us, women's participation is a central, non-negotiable feature in all community action. In our work with communities, we don't separate women's issues from general community issues. Instead, we work with our federation partners to guide each community along to a point where the central participation of it's women is not only allowed but nurtured. This has gradually built a strong federation of women's leadership in Mahila Milan, in which women are treated as the initiators and not consumers of change. It's clear to us that this strength emerged from men and women working together.
If this kind of validation happens in one place, how can it be shared, how can it be extended? In all the exchange programmes around the region, women are central not out of any abstract imperative for gender equity, but for some hard, pragmatic reasons:

• The people most affected by the lack of land and housing are women, so it makes sense then that they should be the ones who decide how and what they learn and do.

• The mass mobilisation which is essential to develop shelter alternatives that work for the poor cannot happen without large numbers of women to sustain the process and embed it in communities

• Women make excellent exchange participants, being so much at home in the horizontal nature of exchanges. Here's how Jockin describes why this is so:
The eight o'clock news: For all this to happen, you need a lot of communication. And who's the biggest talker? Men communicate like telegrams short, coded, minimum information. But women communicate like loudspeakers telling everyone everything! No need to wait for the 8 o'clock news, it's already spread around by then. When women are involved, this is the natural result. Constant talk, constant questions they even talk in their sleep. And they have more subjects than men do kids, money, cooking, health, mothers-in-law, the price of onions and no constraints as men do. Women are the best communication vehicle known to man.

Philippines Internal Exchange Process:
Payatas is one of Manila's largest and most densely-packed squatter settlements, covering some 3,000 hectares of land on the outskirts of Quezon City. Thousands of men, women and children in Payatas make their living gathering, sorting and selling recyclable waste from the mountain-like garbage dump in the middle of Payatas. Seven years ago, these families organised themselves into the Payatas Scavenger's Federation, which is supported by Father Norberto, from the Vincentian Missionaries Social Development Fund (VMSDFI).
Some very busy pesos: Since 1995, VMSDFI has supported a thriving community savings and credit programme in Payatas in which members take loans from their own savings for setting up small businesses or expanding their recycling operations. These micro-enterprise activities have bolstered incomes, strengthened the federation's financial and organisational capabilities and given the scavengers increasing clout in their negotiations for land and credit for housing. So far, over 5,000 families have taken loans, and a 100% payback rate has allowed their savings capital to turn over several times.
The Scavenger's Federation, along with savings groups in other parts of the country, have been involved in the Asian exchange loop since 1996. Community leaders have traveled to India, Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and over the past two years, a growing programme of national exchanges has brought together poor community organisations from all over the Philippines. These exchanges have set off a lively cross-pollination of ideas between poor communities within the Philippines and around Asia and Africa, and have helped transform an effective church-run micro-credit scheme into a national federation of community-driven savings schemes, focusing on access to land, water, sanitation and housing finance.
The Philippines Homeless Peoples Federation is now two years old. National exchanges have consolidated ties between groups in 14 cities with diverse operating structures, working styles and local ideas ties strong enough that last fall, in a crunch, the savings groups in Iloilo loaned 150,000 pesos to the scavengers federation in Payatas to make a downpayment on land! The federation is now using it's links with other savings federations in Asia to develop more tools for managing funds and savings collection that create more frequent interaction among savings groups cluster meetings, community surveys, daily savings. And more national and local exchanges.
Close exchange ties with CBO/NGO partnership models in India, Thailand and South Africa have helped Father Norberto and VMSDFI to redefine its role from a service provider to a federation support organisation. VMSDFI is now looking for funds for more exchanges to help this transition continue, and for setting up a revolving fund.
First big Federation Assembly: Members of poor communities from around the Philippines came together in September, 1998 for the Homeless People's Federation's largest gathering yet. Held in Payatas, the assembly brought together some 1,000 local members and over 200 from across the Philippines Davao, Surigao, Mandaue, Cebu, Calbayog, Samar, Ilo-ilo, General Santos City, Bicol, Luzon and Metro Manila.
The assembly makes a good example of the lively style of the Philippines exchange process. At least eightlanguages were spoken and dozens of sharply different local realities were enumerated at the assembly. Some groups were new, others were being revived, some were church-related, others were mini-federations in their own right. All use savings and credit as the central means of strengthening their communities and securing land and houses.
Over 25,000 families in the federation are in the process of acquiring secure land saving, forming homeowners associations, identifying land, negotiating prices, sorting out titles, planning layouts, exploring loan sources. Land acquisition is the topic numero uno in a country with no intermediate forms of secure tenure for the landless poor. So it's not surprising some of the assembly's most vital and most specific discussions occurred when visitors met people in the thick of their own land acquisition projects.

Local exchanges:
The Philippines is a country of hundreds of islands flung loosely across the South China Sea. It takes days to travel by boat between islands, and airfares are expensive, so movement between cities is not easy. So far, the VMSDFI / Homeless Federation's resources for local exchanges have been limited. But these constraints have by no means stanched a growing process of horizontal exchange within the Philippines. Exchanges within the federation are managed with grace and thrift by the people themselves (and without hotels, caterers or per-diems!). Visitors stay with community families, eat home-cooked meals, and move around town by jeepney and bus. To keep meal costs down at the national assembly, people all brought delicacies from their own regions to contribute bundles of pili-nut sweets, squash and long-beans, baskets of durian, tender asparagus, huge deep-sea tuna from General Santos and bunches of fortifying saba bananas from Mindanao.
Ten Tips for Exchange Supporters

Horizontal exchange is a vigorous step away from external control of community's learning and development. Many professionals are uncomfortable with forms of learning in which outcomes are open-ended, and in which their role may seem secondary more as travel agents and interpreters. But NGOs do have a crucial role to play in supporting horizontal learning to catalyse, to facilitate, to nudge, to anticipate to help leaders strengthen what's happening locally and share what they know with others like themselves. And somebody's got to scramble for funds, write reports, book airline tickets and do all the behind-the-scenes juggling which is essential to good exchange programmes. But doing all this without slipping into control gear can be tricky. Here are a few tips on how to support people's exchange from around the region:

1. TIP: The partnership needs to balance:
An alliance between an NGO and a CBO can be very powerful, because it creates an internal checks and balances system which is essential. Unfortunately this symbiosis isn't too common usually those who control the money control the process, and that's how systems become vertical. Here it's interlocked. If the goal of the partnership is to build a movement, then the NGO can assist in the strategy-making R & D, but communities have to scale up those strategies themselves. The way these roles are negotiated internally is a direct reflection of how the partners negotiate collectively with the state. The choice is partnership and equality or patronage and inequality.

2. TIP: Be in it for the long haul:
Exchanges open communities of the poor to a wide spectrum of social, economic and political strategies, to use as and when they see fit. Aftereffects from exchanges can be powerful, but it can be hard to predict when they happen, since they are a function of on-the-ground realities and not project parameters. Both communities and their NGO partners must be around to take advantage of them.

3. TIP: Don't be a Trainer
When you truly think of yourself as an equal partner, you can never be a trainer. And being a true partner with communities isn't easy in fact it can be painful. They can chew you out sometimes. From India: In our alliance, training is taboo! We've removed the word! Training is a very strong word to be sitting on your head. The minute you take it off, you're free because you're a partner with communities. You're learning together, mentally equipping yourself to be clean and open with communities. None of the mature leaders in communities can stand to be trained. They will straight-away get blocked. Why should I get trained? I don't need any training This is a human tendency.

4. TIP: Don't stand in front:
One of the surest ways to convince the government that poor people are helpless and inarticulate is for NGOs to rush in to interpret, to filter, to mediate to stand in front of them. This is something that happens all the time, and as Jockin puts it, If we don't know ourselves what we want, lots of people like NGOs and big project wallahs will be very happy to come and dance on our heads. Another leader put it this way: We only need an NGO to help open the door, so we can walk in and speak for ourselves. No solution is sustainable unless those who have to manage the solution in the long run are intrinsically involved and right out in front with professionals in the background. This kind of hands-off approach might frustrate development officials who'd rather talk to professionals than to slumdwellers but has the advantage of forcing the establishment of community organisation which is truly independent and lasting.

5. TIP: It helps if you don't want the job:
Sometimes, the best person for the job is somebody who doesn't really want it. The minute you want a job for whatever reasons you consolidate around it, ambition takes off and you go up in the air like a hot air balloon. Some support professionals have found themselves being lavished with compliments about the wonderful things happening in the community processes they support (but didn't make happen). Some squirm at such misdirected credit, but others bask in the glory! As one community leader said to one particularly uneasy professional, As long as you feel that way, it's good. The minute you start thinking you have done it, we're in deep trouble!

6. TIP: You have to participate:
A support NGO has to participate in the exchange process, not behave like a manager of it, saying This should happen, that should happen. A lot of NGOs fall into this trap. If you manage but don't participate in exchange, you loose your ability to anticipate what your community partners will be needing. If exchanges spark an expansion of savings groups, for example, the NGO needs to start putting aside resources and structure projects to support that the community leaders and activists who come can't do that they only do what they are good at.

7. TIP: Don't be a high moral mother:
Fights, dishonesty, jealousy are always part of community processes. The professional's temptation may be to swoop in like a magistrate to smooth rough waters and keep things honest but this can be a real growth-stopper. Those tensions are important for the poor, the stakes are high they're fighting for their lives and future. Let the dust fly just sit back and relax. Try using exchange: get another community to come help, so communities work it out on their own and both get stronger, smarter, more confident. The hosts get useful impressions from peers, and the visitors get the honor of being guru, and a chance to use another's problems as a mirror to reflect on their own communities. And the NGO stays out of the controlling position, and the community owns the process.

8. TIP: Don't think for people:
The main thing you have to offer communities as a professional is a fresh way of looking at the situation that's all. All you can do is throw this on the table and see if it gets picked up. The minute you start pushing your solution, ownership of the process is handed to you, and communities dust off their hands of it thwack thwack. When an NGO starts thinking for people, the process will get stuck. Jockin uses a macabre anecdote to make this important point: If a person tells you he wants to die, instead of saying No, don't do it! Life is too precious! you could say, Very good you might use a knife, or a rope, or torch yourself, or jump in front of the express. So many options are there, yaar! Bring out disadvantages, but don't say the N word, and don't tell him what to do let him come to his own conclusions.

9. TIP: Stay small:
Nobody has ever successfully replicated an innovative NGO. A better bet is to focus on mobilising more and more people from poor communities, in wider and wider circles, to help guide their peers towards improved participation in their own development. In the long run, it is vital that poor communities, as the main group seeking social justice and equity, become central to the growth of their own development process. Better to invest in replicating that than replicating yourself. The NGO role should be one of gradual abdication.

10. TIP: You have to make a good match:
CBOs and their support NGOs have to have a relationship of trust and align on issues and strategies. It's dangerous for NGOs to enter into an exchange process without becoming aware of its larger implications. Exchanges can strengthen ties or they can magnify a troubled NGO CBO relationship. If you're not clear about each other's roles in your routine practice, that will create tension in exchange. Exchange sharpens community articulation and self-determination, and that leads naturally to confronting the centralised decision-making of an NGO which may still be in control gear.face to face Part 4:

We learn more from what we see, hear and do than from what we are taught.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that nothing worth knowing can be taught.

Learning direct from the source: Primary Learning VS secondary learning
Our first judges are properly our senses, which perceive things only by external accidents. To really comprehend a thing, we need to see it, feel it, taste it or do it. If it's true, as the cognition specialists maintain, that 80% of learning comes from what we see and hear and experience, and only 20% comes from formal education, it's a wonder anybody still goes to college or bothers with workshops. At any rate, the message is clear: the power of seeing and doing is stronger than all the lectures and classes and training manuals in the world.
Bigger Ponds: It follows, then, that if you want to create a tradition or an institutional arrangement for expanding poor communities' ways of learning, then the borders of what they see and hear and experience have to keep getting broadened. If you whet people's appetites to learn more things, then you have to keep extending the borders to which they can grow to learn. They have to see, they have to learn, they have to teach. To do that, you can't put people in a small pond, can't restrict the learning to a small space, because then it restricts how much they can learn.
Wisdom from practice, knowledge from experience and insights from seeing are powerful kinds of learning which are, for the most part, denied to the poor, who get stuck where they are in very small and very murky ponds rendered immobile by poverty. If you have never heard about or seen with your own eyes evidence of a process which is effective, how do you take a chance to change the status quo? And when you learn about some effective thing, and even have a chance to see it, how do you get assistance to learn?
A lot of what's written about development approaches comes from what somebody else thinks is correct, not from what is actually good for the poor. If you want to see how viable any scheme is for poor women, those women have to go there, see it and talk to the women who are part of it. There's no substitute for actual exposure.
The exchange process is a way of linking communities and groups that are innovating, looking for answers to the big problems they face, and putting them in touch with each other, with some clear guidelines about the terms of engagement: each group keeps doing what it needs to do for itself others will observe, ask questions and perhaps ask for help adapting some strategy in another place. You help because by articulating your solution, your own process gets sharpened. You move ahead in your own development when you teach someone else. You are no longer alone you have a partner.

In this form of horizontal learning, nobody is above anybody else, nobody is in charge, nobody is filtering or interpreting the message. Exchange makes knowledge a collective asset and sets up a chain of teaching and learning. It also puts into practice seeing is believing. But it is not enough to relate our experiences we must also weigh them, group them, digest them and distill them, throwing away what is not useful, so as to draw out of them the ideas that are useful to us.

Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.
- Antonio Machado
Knowing that somebody else does it, and that it's good for them does not empower you. You need to do it yourself. You cannot be empowered by somebody else's discovery it has to work for you, and to get it to work for you, you have to do it yourself. Each one needs to learn, to go through something in order to internalize it. The proverbial wheel needs to be reinvented again and again. It is the same thing with the exchange process, where we say: This is how we do it. We will teach you how we do it, but then you will have to do it the way you need to do it. Exchanges can help compress this, speed up and shorten the cycle, make things more efficient, but that digestion and reinvention has to happen.
This is especially true in women's learning just because somebody says it works, women don't believe it. This is especially characteristic of poor women. Unless they see it, unless they understand how it works, unless they try it out, they will not accept it and through this process of doing away with what doesn't work, they hit on horizontal or peer learning, which actually allows one set of women who have developed a certain skill or insight to demonstrate it to somebody else, and to help them pick it up. These solutions may take time, but they are based on common sense and they work for everyone.

Cooking Lessons from India: Local exchanges within Mahila Milan/NSDF
The scale of the national exchange programme within Mahila Milan / National Slum Dwellers Federation, like the scale of everything else in India, is mind-bending: in a federation which encompasses something like three and a half million people in 28 cities (2 million in Bombay alone a third of the city's slum dwellers), at least 500 people go on at least 70 exchange visits to other cities each month. As for exchange within cities, nobody keeps track any more nobody could! Here are some thoughts on exchange from Sheela Patel, from SPARC, the federation's NGO partner:
For the MM/NSDF/SPARC Alliance, community exchange is the root strategy for all education and mobilization. It is through exchange that poor communities in the federation design new ways of solving old problems, communicate, disseminate ideas, monitor processes and support activities to thrive and grow.
The process began fifteen years ago when women living on the pavements in Bombay first began to interact with SPARC. We found that women on one side of the street hadn't spent much time with those on the other side, and so we initiated a process of interaction between the different pavement communities. Gradually, this extended to all informal settlements in the city, then all over the country, and over the last eight years around the world.
First you need enough people in one place to feel strongly about wanting to get something done, to get their hands on some solid idea and actually demonstrate some kind of solution to themselves something about which they can say, This is how we want it. Having done that, anyone interested can come have a look at this solution and explore the process which produced it. A whole lot of people in different communities around India have begun to acknowledge their own preoccupations, to try to understand them, to experiment. The federation is kept alive by all this experimentation in all these scattered communities. It's like a hundred cooking pots simmering away, each with it's own masala, it's own concoction of local circumstances, personalities and whimsy.
Out of these hundred pots, maybe ten, twenty or even fifty will find similarities in what they are doing and intensify their interaction with each other. That enables them to look at their situation from a wider perspective, at a larger scale. Some groups are running crisis credit groups, others are determined to get toilets or land tenure. Some want to reconstruct their houses, others are looking for credit to start small businesses. Through exchange, these ideas and strategies circulate, and with so many people sustaining their experimenting, all these groups get inspired, and in turn inspire others. In India, every single new idea, every single new programme and innovation that has come into use in the federation in the last ten years has come out of communities doing it. This is how a collective awareness grows among the urban poor an awareness determined by their material needs.
The federation in India now has what we call a critical mass. This means that large enough numbers of people are working towards solving their problems, helping others to solve theirs and learning from each other's experiences to start affecting real change. As the exchange process in India has progressed, it has created enough catalysts and trainers to ensure that the process can reach out to more and more communities across the country, and the process has snowballed. We constantly play city off city, project off project. They try different things, and there is a fast and powerful communication network in place to spread those ideas around.
Traffic control: All this exchanging and exposing is handled by core teams in NSDF/MM. The managerial tactic is usually that older members within the federation guide newer members through the process. This hand holding is done within cities and across cities and states, and constantly seeks to engage more communities and make present relationships deeper and stronger.
When a team of senior leaders from Bombay visits a city, the local federation usually works out with them a list of things they need to learn through visiting other cities and federations. Then, when they feel they're ready to go, they take an advance from their own savings to pay for their trip and they go. No NGO or external organisation has to give them permission it's their own decision, within their local federation. Later on, when they've reported back to Bombay (usually by phone or in person), they get reimbursed from Bombay. Local federations chose their own leaders to go on exchanges and do their own follow-up evaluation of their exchange teams by looking collectively at how effectively the returning leaders have passed on experiences and solutions they saw elsewhere.

Using the Vanguard Communities
In most of the national exchange processes around the network, there are certain communities that are the vanguards in the process. The ones up at the front of the line, the innovators, the risk takers, the go-getters. So in Bombay, you have your Byculla Mahila Milan, and in Pune there's Rajendranagar. Then South Africa has its Philippi and Zimbabwe has its Mbare. In Phnom Penh you have Toul Svay Prey and in the Philippines it's Payatas. These communities become demonstration centres and hosts of innumerable exchange visits. What is important is that their maturity emerges out of the local work that they do. They're not only getting the big visitors from other countries, but so many local people are coming to meet them, to see the houses, to watch the process. For every international guest these communities receive, they're receiving a hundred local and national guests. So increasingly in the exchange network, you have communities that learn to set up and manage their own exchange events.
After handling such a lot of traffic, these vanguard communities become very resourceful and efficient hosts of exchange teams. Many find that with time, they don't need an NGO to come along. The Byculla Mahila Milan have even been known to do without translators now and then. Now, when the South Africans, Cambodians and Nepalis come to India, you don't need a SPARC there, you just send the visiting teams out with these Mahila Milan women and they talk in their own simple telegraphic language: You go do this, go do that! Banoo and Rehemat may know only a few words of English, but there's so much affection there, so much understanding about people's needs. They can take visitors around on their savings collections, go shopping with them, take them to eat.
Probably can't / definitely can: Senegal in South Africa

I think I can't / I know I can: Senegal in South Africa
Last March, a group of women from the Savings and Loan Network in Dakar, Senegal visited some Cape Town savings schemes in the South African Homeless People's Federation (uMfelanda Wonye). The Senegalese network came with 12 years of experience in savings and loan schemes for income generation, but were short on experience in people-driven housing processes. From the South African federation (which at that point had just built it's ten-thousandth house) the women were on the lookout for lessons in how poor women like themselves can develop the technical skills to design and construct their own houses.
The visit makes a good case for the power of seeing, and describes a transformation that repeats itself again and again across the exchange experience. The women on the exchange had taken part in several technical training programmes back home in Dakar, set up by Enda Graf, the Senegal network's NGO partner. They'd seen manuals, they'd been given presentations, they'd looked at slides of flower-bedecked, people-built houses but all that hadn't translated into much confidence that they had it in them to build any houses.
We're not positive that we can develop the technical capacity to undertake such work, said a reticent Ndeye Astou Ndao, at the beginning of the trip. In South Africa, women who had planned their own settlements and built their own houses did their best to pile on the reassurance. Their message was clear women can pick up the technical skills to build good, solid houses they do it all the time but the actual building of houses is secondary to all the preparing and organizing and mobilizing that has to happen before the day you start building.
Patricia Matolengwe, the SA federation's national chairperson, explained that the South African women were able to develop their skills through exchange visits with Mahila Milan in India. We didn't know how either! We didn't know how to conduct affordability studies, to make bricks, to design plans or construct houses, but we experimented, and we learned.
But stronger than all the encouragement and all the persuasion was what they saw in federation housing developments at Victoria Mxenge and around Cape Town, where women worked alongside men laying foundations, installing roofing sheets, digging trenches for sewer lines, making cement wall blocks. In savings offices they saw more women sketching house plans on the backs of electricity bills, arguing about square footage and ventilation, totting up costs on a calculator. Everywhere they looked, women were intensely involved in some stage of planning, saving for, building or moving into their own houses houses which stretched in long, neat lines almost as far as the eye could see.
This from Another Senegalese visitor, Aminata Mbaye: When I asked the technician who works with us in Dakar to show us how layout plans are designed, he used such a sophisticated jargon that I barely understood a word he said. Yesterday when we were in Protea South, we asked a woman to draw a plan for us. When she explained house modeling and showed us around, I understood it, and felt I could do that too. And this from the same reticent Ndeye, at the end of the trip: But now that we have concretely witnessed the South African women's work, we know this can be done. I just hope we can convince the women back home!

Ten Rules-of-Thumb for Planning meaty exposures:
There are now lots of groups around Asia and Africa involved in on-going exchange relationships with other countries and within their own. All these exchange programs cultivate their own rituals, and find their own ways of managing these complex processes gracefully and effectively, of getting the balance of elements right, so the exchange visits energize both visitors and hosts, and doesn't leave both of them zapped. Managing but not over-managing exchange visits is a complex science, and not everybody agrees exactly how to do it. A lively, perpetual, friendly debate surrounds the questions of who goes, how long, what to do, when to go, how much to plan or whether to plan at all.... But amongst the assortment of all these tricks, a few important common principles emerge. Here are ten of them not necessarily everyone's top ten, though so take it with a grain of salt:

1. You have to have a Burning Question:
How to deal with a crooked leader? How to make a cheaper foundation? How to persuade hostile city governments to support your plans? How? Why? What? There has to be something you're urgently looking for some advice, some fresh idea. This kind of thirst comes only when you've got a stake in your process at home, when you're in deep enough to have developed enough problems and gotten in enough tight spots to really need ideas. For this reason, some of the least productive exchanges are those which send out brand-new groups involved in brand-new initiatives on tours, before anything is happening on the ground.

2. You have to do some homework first:
If you haven't plunged into your own work before you go, it's all theoretical, all in the air still, all ideas without any application. Without an anchor in your own reality and in solid work on the ground back home, exposure trips can be like a tour of voo-voo land. And the best kind of anchor is getting something started before you go preparing, mobilizing, saving, land-searching, negotiating, building, designing anything! When some NGO shows up with a few community people but no people's process, the hosts have to wonder, where are these seeds going to be sown?

3. You have to Send Vital Leaders:
In exchange, you are linking vibrant leadership in different places, you're not creating a new bunch of consultants without any day-to-day responsibilities, who just want to float all over the place. Exchange is based on a foundation of activism on the ground, and people's ability to do things can only be sharpened on the ground. For instance, Laxmi's ability to train others emerges from demonstrable ability to be a superb collector of daily savings. As she gets busier with exchange work in other cities, she becomes more efficient, does her tasks in smaller amounts of time but the important thing is she doesn't NOT do those tasks!

4. It has to be a group:
You can never give exposure to individuals big rule! You have to take groups, and the groups have to be compatible enough at least initially to live with each other for five or ten days. The first exchange experience shouldn't be a cat fight. Never going alone and never doing anything alone is a key learning principle, it's a way of spreading out wisdom, building teams, extracting maximum learning capital out of one experience.

5. Send Men and women:
You need a balance of men and women. Women's participation cannot be separate, as a project or a strategy, but must flow as a central feature of all activities and as a process of organisational work. This is not for some abstract goal of equity, but for practical reasons women are at the centre of development, they know what's what in their communities they're natural born surveyors, the natural communicators. They're the ones who will carry this learning back and spread it around guaranteed.

6. Send veterans and first-timers:
In on-going exchange relationships, there needs to be a balance between people who participate in exchange continuously who evolve and grow and new people who get exposure to that process. The ability to make strategic intervention emerges out of a deepening understanding of the process. You need some continuity, need some people who are always going. But you constantly need new people getting new exposure. You need a balance. Keep bringing new people in who the veterans learn to look after. It's like falling into the footsteps. Also, you create a hierarchy of people who are in line.

7. You need to give people room to adapt.
Many first-time community travellers react violently to different situations, can't handle some things, have trouble with food, weather, drinking water, health. These things have to be taken care of, allowed, so people can get past the shock and actually relax enough to look and learn. Sometimes this means not doing too much so people don't get overwhelmed and close up, and sometimes it's just a question of teams acknowledging these problems and dealing with them.

8. Don't go for too long:
No exchange visit works for more than ten days two weeks at the outside. There is a tendency to want to go for two months, when you're going so far away and getting this chance! But fatigue sets in. Also, you are taking vibrant and effective leadership on the ground from one country to another country. You're not taking people who have nothing to do! They have responsibilities in their communities, and are serious about them. That's who you want to be on the exchanges.

9. You need a good interpreter:
The role of interpreter is very important in exchange. This person is the medium through which communication between these peers will flow, and if that flow is coloured, or drained of its liveliness, or manipulated, it can botch things up and prevent that transfer, that exchange especially in exchanges where there is not yet a relationship of trust between the groups. A person who is actually interested in the process, who can translate in a lively, accurate and sensitive way without interpreting and processing is a gold mine.

10. Exchanges should be an extension of ongoing process:
Exchange relationships shouldn't be entered upon lightly. The critical decision-makers first interact and familiarize themselves with each other and ensure that the exchange process will strengthen their on-going work. It can't be an add-on, and this must reflect in the way the exchange programme is designed. Also, participants must take exchange for what it is: no more and no less an exposure to new things, which each individual community must themselves decide what to use. It is not a training leading to funding.face to face Part 6:

You learn when you teach, and teach best while you're learning.
The perpetual dabba:
In India, there's a custom of sending home-cooked eatables around to neighbours and family in little steel boxes called dabbas. Indian kitchens are filled with dabbas, each engraved with the family name, to keep track of whose dabbas are whose, in all this culinary coming and going. The loveliest part of the custom is that you never return a dabba empty there's always a sweet, some mango pickle or a little curry inside. In cold economic terms, this is a quid pro quo, but in human terms, it's a way of consolidating kinship and friendship, and perpetuating the exchange of human kindness and mutual help theoretically forever.
It's a l