MEETINGS AT BRILLO NUEVO AND 3-D "TELEPHONE" GAME WITH ARTISANS We got to Brillo Nuevo last Wednesday night, set up our travel hammocks, ate some tuna fish for dinner, covered up the perishable food to protect it from cockroaches and mice and went to sleep. We had a long meeting with the community on Thursday morning which was pretty rough for while - lots of comments from artisans about issues they were having with other artisans. While one fellow suggested that CACE should leave the community, I was relieved and happy that most artisans and others said that while there were issues that needed to be worked out to improve communication, trust and civility between the artisans, they said that CACE was not responsible for these and they thought we were doing a good job and wanted to keep working with us on the craft development and forestry projects to come. Sharing my thoughts and repsonses to questions push my Spanish abilities to their limit. We met the artisans in the afternoon. This was a lot more fun since it involved doing some team-building games (thanks to my colleagues at Shaver's Creek Team Building Center for nice ideas), discussion of how we wanted to try again to work with small groups, not individual artisans, and then reviewed and paid for the crafts they brought to fulfill last order. Pics below are of one game that's kind of like telephone except it involves a team working together to assemble a structure. 1. Team A with one or two people look at a picture of a group of 15 objects on a computer that are put together in a certain way. They then verbally describe five of these objects and what their relative positions are to the one or two people in Team B. 2. Team B then goes to the "store" with multiple objects spread around and tries to pick out the 5 objects described to them. 3. Team B then takes these objects to Team C and describes to them how they think these objects should be positioned relative to each other. 4. Team C then takes the objects toTeam D and explains to them how they think the objects should be assembled. 5. Team D then takes the objects to a staging area and tries to assemble them based on the instructions they received. One of the facilitators (in this case me) is on hand with a picture of the correctly assembled objects and tells Team D first if they have all of the correct objects. If they don't they need to pass the wrong object(s) back down the chain and try to get the right one. If the positioning is wrong, they also need to describe how they have done it down the chain and get updated feedback from Team A how to do it right. 6. The process then continues with the second and third set of objects 7. At the end of 20 minutes the team gets 3 points for each object that matches the correct one in the photo and 0-4 points for how well each one is placed in relation to its correct position (maximum 90 points for perfect score). We had three groups that did this and 3 other games in a circuit. The group with the best score on this game got 68 points. One motivation for this game was to help the artisans appreciate the importance of accurate communication of ideas, concepts and information. It was not an easy game, but they had fun.
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