Day 4 or is it 5...

I actually could not tell you how long we have been down here or what day it is. I can however tell you that today was another exciting, challenging and thrilling day in the office working with the supervisores.  These are the men in the organization who go out on motorcycles to survey village build sites at the 1 month, 6 month and 1 year points. They collect the essential data for Carbon Credit certification, make sure the stoves are being used correctly, and monitor the stove functionality.

The most exciting thing about the new system for this particular role in Proyecto Mirador is the GPS and mapping capabilities these men will now be able to tap into.  They no longer need to go from house to house asking where Maria Elena Hernandez lives but rather will be able to compare their actual mapped location (provided by the iPhones) to high resolution map printouts that have pins marking Maria Elena Hernandez's household along with all of the others to be surveyed in the village.

Again this was a great day for technology transfer. Despite the challenges that come with learning anything new, the men quickly picked up and got excited about the functionality of the system.  When we asked them to complete practice surveys after the first step of observational learning, the early finishers moved on to working their iPhone cameras... one especially sharp supervisor then asked if there could be a way to capture pictures of broken stoves to go with the files compiled, such an exciting thought!

In building the practice village and household accounts for supervisor practice I had the chance to take Elder into the system and work with him step by step building each of the levels inside of Salesforce.  Building the accounts was not a challenge but in each step he related what we were doing to his and his co-workers roles in Proyecto Mirador.  Finding it was another really incredible conversation where I got to see just how capable he is at management and how engaged he is in making this work, I eventually pulled Stevan over.  We delved into collective brainstorming.  Elder would raise issues and we would collectively come up with options and the solution that best fit the problem.

As we moved through the levels he would frequently reference their current paper system; telling me that it was hard for him to give it up because he had built, and rightly took great pride in it.  It was at this point that I had a opportunity that, for me, definitely marked the highest point of the day if not the entire week of training and I feel so unbelievably honored and thrilled I got to be the person to communicate it.

I got to tell Elder that this platform Stevan has built and that Esther, Dee, Cathy, Skye, Rachel and Richard have contributed to is based off of his and Emilia's meticulous monitoring and management plan.  This is his and Doña Emilia's paper monitoring invention and managerial genius, strengthened by the support and hard work of those of us in CA and CO and then transferred into technology.  When he saw the role he had played in creating this platform you could feel the strengthened connection and comitment to the very challenging process of learning.  This is not something that was built only by one side and then forced upon others but rather something that every person added to and worked incredibly hard to create.  I have moments of wonder when I think about the huge amounts of work each contributor gave and the enormously powerful tool the collective effort has created.

On that note I don't think I need to share any more... there were the glitches and blockades but we keep pushing ahead towards a very exciting future.

Some videos for your viewing pleasure...

 

It was very hard to pry those iPhones out of the supervisors hands at the end of the day...