Vox Populi Video
In the spring of 2013, members of the Project Sammaan team from CFAR and Quicksand spent the day visiting one of the bastis (i.e., slums) in Bhubaneswar. The purpose of this visit, as I wrote about in a previous post, was to provide a platform for community members to discuss any aspects of their lives that they wished to, irrespective of its relevance to Sammaan.
We intentionally kept the questions vague and open-ended to encourage interviewees to share as much as possible. Queries such as, “What is it like living here?” and “What do you like and dislike about your community?” led to some great insights.
The guiding principle of Sammaan is to reinforce the assumptions made throughout the design and implementation of the initiative by soliciting input from end-users. This has led to numerous engagement activities in the past to conduct user feedback and co-creation sessions with those we’re building these facilities for, and these were as invaluable in terms of insights as they were meaningful in regards to engaging with these host communities.
Quicksand discussing sanitation with boys in a Bhubaneswar slum
However, other than a homestay conducted in one of Bhubaneswar’s slums in April 2012, the team had not really spent time simply engaging with the members of the host communities on a personal level. That is, the interactions were largely limited to information-gathering sessions that helped direct aspects of Sammaan. Though these were rather personal affairs, with many of the meetings conducted in the homes of community members, the team felt the need to step outside of the project and to get to know the residents and share their stories.
Members of the CFAR team engaging with community members in Bhubaneswar
It was a great experience for me personally. As a foreigner, even despite being here for nearly two years, these environments are still very new to me and I’m always taken aback by how open, engaging, and welcoming the community members are to me and the rest of the team. They shared intimate details of their lives and were willing to do so on camera for, by and large, a group of strangers; this level of honesty and transparency is certainly admirable, even enviable.
We published highlights from three of these interviews in English on the blog, and in both English and Oriya in our monthly newsletter. We also created a short documentary video about the experience, which can be found here:
Project Sammaan – Vox Populi from Quicksand on Vimeo.