An invitation
In 2002, I was working as a community health educator in Gabon, Central Africa. I arrived ready to “teach,” going into health clinics or schools with colourful flip charts and interactive activities. However, I soon found that learning happened most within the physical spaces that people considered significant. For example, I went “en brousse” (to the plantation) with a friend and her three-year old daughter in order to learn how women in the village planted and harvested manioc (cassava) root. With the sun beating down, trying to wield a machete as a garden tool, I soon learned that (1) I “knew” nothing and (2) that I was not going to learn the “skills” of working en brousse. Half way through the eight-hour day my friend took my machete and told me to sit with her daughter. When I protested, she told me to sit. Her daughter and I spent the afternoon playing games in the dirt with a stick and rock, while my friend finished working in the plantation. I cannot quantify this type of learning into an “outcome,” or try to reproduce it in a research proposal. However, it was my friend’s hospitality, to evoke Derrida (in Borradori, 2003), inviting me into a space of difference, which allowed me to even begin to engage with what I did not know.
Located at the intersections of education and public health, my work as a researcher, project manager and program developer is driven by a desire to bridge the space between youth and the policies and programs that aim to serve them. This requires speaking with youth and continually learning from them. It is an always-political project, one committed to finding ways of engaging people in imagining and acting towards more just understandings of social identities and their relations.