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LESSONS LEARNED

And Awareness of Possibilities To Carry On

by Phil Bartle, PhD

Training Handout

As mobilizers come and go in each community, there should be linkages and continuity between them; what each learns should become part of the corporate memory of the total intervention

We humans can learn from both success and failure, from achievements and mistakes. Remember that mistakes, failures and disasters are not the same.

A mistake is not a failure; to err is human. A failure is not a disaster; failing to achieve something does not mean you are a failure. A disaster does not mean the end of life or the end of time. When we fall down we must pick ourselves up and carry on. A day at a time.

If you have been successful at guiding a community to build its own latrine, or complete some other objective, then you have gone one step towards making it more self reliant. It will have not gone smoothly or perfectly. If you think it did, then you are not being honest with yourself.

Analyse the process and your role in it. Be courageously honest in admitting your mistakes. Write down your analysis of the mobilization cycle. Be objective and neutral about mistakes and failures; do not use them as an excuse to paralyse yourself with depression.

Use them as lessons to be learned; far more useful and realistic than what you can learn out of a text book or a hand book such as this one. Use your journal, use your analysis, use your lessons learned, to grow stronger and more skilled as a mobilizer.

Do the same with, and for, the community.

© Copyright 1967, 1987, 2007 Phil Bartle
Web Design by Lourdes Sada

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Last update: 2011.09.25