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Comment by MariJo on November 19, 2012 at 2:20pm

Translation of video transcript


Wellcome to the Festival!
M. I am Marion, Je suis Marion et voilà.
I. My name is Ita, from Barcelona. Hi.
M. Unfortunately we won't be able to be with you in India but we wanted to share with you in some way our experience and learning from BarnaCompetence.
I. Yes, a small though important experience. We were talking about how everything started after we got in touch with the Constellation, the Competence process. After having gone through the Blended Learning and having learnt a few things about it, we thought of doing some Salt visits here in Barcelona, in our place.
We come from the associative field, we have quite some experience in that, and we started by identifying what we thought of as communities. We approached some of them and we asked them to invite us for a Salt visit. All of them were colleagues, like Sida Studi. So our big surprise came when these people did not define themselves as community. They thought of themselves as organizations, as service delivering associations, as people working together... Yes, as professionals. But there they did not self identify as community.
Maybe this idea of community....
M. In the cooperation field, the idea of community is broadly used but in reference to those 'out there'; what we perceive here is the existence of organizations of experts and communities are out there in the field, talking of solidarity and so forth. But we did not find community here... Well, we found it but...
I. Yes, but people does not feel like a community. It is as if the sense of community, the community feeling of people had gone kind of 'asleep'. Something was happening there, the experience was there, we could connect with people who had come together around a common objective, giving response to the HIV epidemic as in our case, but they did not consider themselves as community. They named that otherwise. But we understood what was taking place as the expression of community.
Then we understood that in order to awake the sense of community it was necessary to wake up the awareness of what really was taking place, to what people were not seeing.
In the groups we visited we noticed that there were a few people with whom we have instant connection...
M. Yes, with whom we had things in common, with whom we felt naturally connected and felt the need to come closer and tell them: 'you belong to my clan. I feel like doing things with you because I know that joining together I will do better, there will be better opportunities'.
I. We could see that we did not find the sense of community we were expecting but individuals we were tuned with because we shared this 'longing' for community. The feeling that we, as human beings, were lacking a dimension of ourselves, an essential part of our nature. And this dimension can only be met adding to other people.
From now on, maybe we our objective will start by connecting with people at individual level first and instead of telling that we would like to salt visit them because they are a community we can ask them if 'any of you feels that there are certain things that we cannot do unless you do them with other people?'
M. And the lesson learnt is that we need to re-discover our connection as humans in order to get awareness of the fa t that we also are community.