Friend and colleage, Steven Werlin writes about his experiences.
LIFE GOES ON: PART 2
by Steven Werlin
Life goes on in the midst of the current difficulties in Haiti, for better and for worse. Last weekend, I got a heavy dose of the better and it seems worth sharing.
I spent most of the weekend at the Villa Ormiso. It’s a guesthouse run by conservative Protestant missionaries, here in Haiti to convert the masses. They would not normally be my cup of tea, but the guesthouse they run is valuable to us as a pleasant and accessible place where we can organize inexpensive meetings that last several days. Last weekend, more than forty of us gathered there for the fourth annual meeting of the Haitian Open Space Institute. I missed last year’s meeting, but had attended the others, so I was anxious to attend this year’s as well.
Open Space meetings are something special. They were designed around the notion that the most productive time that groups spend together is often the unscheduled time: the coffee breaks, the lunches, the unforeseen delays in otherwise tight agendas. Those are the times during which meeting participants talk with the people they want to talk with, and talk to them about the things that are important to them.
At an Open Space gathering, the participants create an agenda for the a meeting – ours was to be two-and-a-half days long – during its first few minutes. The agenda consists of a schedule of group discussions running parallel to one another on themes chosen by the participants who propose them. Each participant then chooses the small group discussions he or she wants to attend. The guiding principle is that you should not be part of anything you’re not interested in. The underlying assumption is that, given the freedom to do so, people will make good decisions about how to use their time.
For me, the most important thing about the structure of these meetings is that it allows me to find time to meet individually with various people I want to talk with. I find that I don’t often attend many of the scheduled conversations, but that I get a lot accomplished nonetheless, much more than I could accomplish if we were all following a carefully planned schedule.
I was especially grateful this year for the opportunity to meet with people on the edge of the meeting because I was actually able to attend rather little of it. Life goes on here in Haiti even as the political situation seems to spin into chaos, and that means work goes on as well. I had a busy schedule of meetings to attend in various places as the large Open Space meeting at the Villa Ormiso was going on.
We arrived at the Ormiso on Thursday afternoon. It’s located in Bizoton, a neighborhood on the road from Pòtoprens into Kafou, its overcrowded southern suburb. The opening ceremony was Thursday evening, and it was unforgettable. My partner Frémy used the meeting as the occasion to get married.
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