Barcham Richard, Silas Esther, Irie Jesse
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Copland Building, ANU, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.
Touching The Untouchables, Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.
Rural Remote Health. 2016 Oct-Dec;16(4):3553. Epub 2016 Dec 24.
Evidence shows that the government of Papua New Guinea is failing to provide basic services in health to the majority of its people. Local non-government organisations (NGOs), partnered with international NGOs, are attempting to fill this gap. With limited resources, these small Indigenous organisations must focus much of their effort on training that supports self-reliance as the main strategy for communities to improve their quality of life. This project explored the training content and methodology of Touching The Untouchables (TTU), a small Indigenous NGO based in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, that has trained a network of village volunteers in health promotion and safe motherhood.
Village life imposes multiple demands, from self-sufficiency in food to maintaining law and order. There are established attitudes about power and dependence, referred to as 'cargo thinking'. Cargo thinking stands as a barrier to the necessity of self-reliance, and requires training strategies that seek to empower participants to create change from their own initiative. Empowerment is understood as oriented towards individual people taking collective action to improve their circumstances by rectifying disparities in social power and control. To achieve self-reliance, empowerment is necessarily operational on the levels of person, community and society.
In addition to being operational on all three levels of empowerment, the training content and methodology adopted and developed by TTU demonstrate that empowering practice in training employs approaches to knowledge that are evidence-based, reflexive, contextual and skill-based. Creating knowledge that is reflexive and exploring knowledge about the broader context uses special kinds of communicative tools that facilitate discussion on history, society and political economy. Furthermore, training methodologies that are oriented to empowerment create settings that require the use of all three types of communication required for cooperative action: dramaturgical, normative and teleological communication.
The success of TTU's training content and methodology demonstrates that creating the conditions for achieving collective self-reliance through empowerment is a necessary part of primary health promotion in Papua New Guinea, and that underlying the success of empowerment oriented training are definable types of knowledge and communication.
有证据表明，巴布亚新几内亚政府未能为其大多数民众提供基本的医疗卫生服务。当地非政府组织（NGO）与国际非政府组织合作，试图填补这一空白。由于资源有限，这些小型本土组织必须将大部分精力集中在培训上，将支持自力更生作为社区改善生活质量的主要策略。本项目探讨了“接触不可接触者”（TTU）的培训内容和方法，TTU是一个位于东高地省戈罗卡的小型本土非政府组织，该组织培训了一个村庄志愿者网络，内容涉及健康促进和安全孕产。
乡村生活带来了多方面的需求，从食物自给自足到维护法律和秩序。对于权力和依赖存在既定的态度，即所谓的“货物思维”。货物思维是自力更生必要性的障碍，需要培训策略来促使参与者主动创造改变。赋权被理解为旨在让个人采取集体行动，通过纠正社会权力和控制方面的差距来改善自身处境。为实现自力更生，赋权必须在个人、社区和社会层面发挥作用。
除了在赋权的所有三个层面发挥作用外，TTU采用和开发的培训内容和方法表明，培训中的赋权实践采用了基于证据、反思性、情境性和技能性的知识方法。创造反思性知识并探索更广泛背景下的知识，使用了特殊的交流工具，便于讨论历史、社会和政治经济。此外，以赋权为导向的培训方法创造了需要使用合作行动所需的三种交流类型的环境：戏剧性交流、规范性交流和目的论交流。
TTU培训内容和方法的成功表明，通过赋权创造实现集体自力更生的条件是巴布亚新几内亚初级卫生促进的必要组成部分，而且以赋权为导向的培训成功的基础是可定义的知识类型和交流方式。
