Today was a bit of an interesting day, to say the least: I talked to the police and exercised some knowledge from our IGR seminar.
First, the police. Nothing major happened and I am 100% okay, in case anyone was worried. No, it was a minor security alarm mishap. After my meeting with one of my supervisors today, I had to go to one of the churches in order to print and copy a few things. Since the secretary had gone home by that time, the building was locked and the security system armed. A code was made for me when I first started working there, and I had a key to the building, so I figured everything would be fine. But it wasn’t – the keypad was stuck and I punched in my code numerous times, until a voice loudly told me that the police were called and I needed to vacate the premises.
So two squad cars pulled up into the church in about five minutes, and they were very pleasant and just took down my name and wished me a good rest of my day. Apparently the police almost never show up; the member of the church who was called to come in said that in 15 years of coming in when the alarm went off, he has seen the police only one other time. So I, uh, feel very special that my mistake was important enough for the police to send two squad cars over.
There was also a meeting tonight for myself and Pastor Kirstin to talk to and “train” some volunteers from the church to go out and survey members of the community with us. I had a bit of a challenge in trying to convey the overall goal of my purpose as an intern this summer. The majority of the people I was talking to thought that when they were canvassing, the major purpose was to try to get more people to come to their church. I could understand why they would think so, but my numerous attempts at trying to explain that while that might be something to follow up on later, but for the present moment I just needed information from them about the community were less than successful. (Though, thankfully, one elderly gentleman did seem to understand this, and kept reiterating it to the other church members who were there, but it didn’t really seem like they were listening.)
I definitely took a feather out of Pastor Kirstin’s hat with the way she handled it, though. She more or less took what I was trying to say and rephrased it in a way that the church members could understand. Maybe it was because she was their Pastor and I was some girl most of them just met, but I think more of it was just a core difference in perspective: they were there because of the church, and they cared about the church first and foremost, whereas I was there because of a research fellowship and cared most about the information.
It was at this point that the true point of community-based research dawned on me; the research is not all about me and what I’m doing, and the purpose of it is to help the community better themselves. Without their support or knowledge or skills, the research would not even be taking place. I’m really just brought in as a facilitator, to give them a way to accomplish what it is they’d like to do. So, I now know that I should try to frame things in ways that they will see as immediately beneficial, because improving their home community is much more important than me trying to impose certain ways of thinking on them. They have been gracious enough to let me into their community and to allow me to help them, so the least I can do is extend the same courtesy.
