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Marla Petal, GHI’s Project Director for the USAID-funded
project in Central Asia, brings fresh insight on how to best share
knowledge and experience to improve earthquake safety in developing
regions. Her observations on all aspects of training activities
taking place in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan infuse the
reports she brings back home to GHI’s Palo Alto office with
convincing examples of progress underway. My recent conversation
with her was no exception. While we were discussing current activities
in GHI’s Central Asia project over coffee at our local café,
a lively group of students passed through and nearly drowned out
our words. Their boisterous arrival at the café, however,
provided a fitting reminder of just how fortunate we citizens
in California are to enjoy a robust level of earthquake safety,
the result of many years’ of public and private collaboration,
planning, training, legislation and resource allocation, and how
difficult it is for each generation to pass on its lessons to
the next.
But how does GHI share this experience to improve
earthquake safety far away in the Central Asia project?
“GHI’s role in Central Asia is to activate and
synergize the silos of knowledge and experience that already
exist, but that exist in parallel structures,” Marla explains.
“Most organizations, institutions and individuals there
tend to approach the problem of high earthquake risk without
the benefit of collaborating to strengthen their knowledge base,
preparation, and practices. |
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GHI works with local partners to bring these ‘silos’
together. Our jointly-sponsored workshops encourage people to
collaborate and thereby develop effective solutions to reduce
their earthquake risk.”
GHI’s efforts with local partners involve all phases
of planning and conducting interdisciplinary training workshops
for public officials, teachers, and other community leaders.
The fall 2004 Earthquake Safety Initiative Symposia held in
Tashkent, Almaty and Dushanbe provide a good example. The symposia
brought together 60-90 professionals in each city from schools,
hospitals, government agencies, academic institutes and ngos
to share information, identify needs and priorities and explore
cooperative activities. When asked to explain GHI’s contribution,
Marla summarizes with a potent example. “Our GHI priority
is to bridge the gap between knowledge and action,” she
begins. “Implementation of the knowledge is the problem.
We all know that dirty water can make you sick. But knowing
this doesn’t make the water clean!” |
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She explains how regional leadership workgroups in the
Central Asia project approach developing public education materials.
“Our effort is to energize the stakeholders and allow
them to view themselves as important pieces in a larger puzzle,
and to discover the power of fitting the pieces together, one
by one, using a two-step approach of adaptation and adoption.
In each workgroup, interdisciplinary teams of experts and
end users collaborate in a process that will lead to completed
documents appropriately adapted for local use. First, they collectively
review international resources available in the subject matter
relevant to their goal. The teams, provided with a basic Russian
translation as the common working language, select appropriate
material and then set about to review and revise each document,
word by word, in order to create effective new local models.
The team members will then add local knowledge and culturally
important information, transforming these models into the core
documents that can be seeded for wider review, adaptation and
adoption. Of course, this includes changing or modifying the
text illustrations to include objects and settings most familiar
to the end users. Only then are the training documents ready
for adoption (step two) according to local needs and purposes.”
Adoption of the documents occurs through a process that Marla
describes as “cascading.” From each workshop, newly
trained professionals and volunteers in many fields return to
their own communities and lead seminars, workshops, and classes
that involve ever-wider circles of aware and informed individuals.
In the case of educational institutions, the training eventually
reaches students and their parents in local schools: to date,
many thousands of school community members (students, teachers
and parents) in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
have become aware of ways in which they can mitigate their earthquake
risk as a result of training that began with GHI co-sponsored
workshops.
Marla Petal, GHI Project Director (seated
on floor, far right), meets with Earthquake Safety Initiative
Symposium participants in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (Fall 2004)
The hospital preparedness workgroup that met in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
in January 2005 followed this two-step approach with encouraging
results. In this workshop, jointly sponsored and organized by
GHI’s Central Asia Project and the Kyrgyz Hospital Association
(the only hospital association in Central Asia), representatives
from the Ministries of Health from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
and Uzbekistan worked together with city coordinators in GHI’s
Central Asia Project, all of whom are responsible for community
mobilization. Each city coordinator had first approached their
respective state Ministries of Health to encourage the Ministry
to identify appropriate representatives to participate in the
workgroups. Over fifteen participants engaged in the three-day
experience. Marla Petal guided the workgroup from the sidelines,
while city coordinators facilitated a lively and productive
discussion in Russian. Two English-fluent participants monitored
the original English documents as they moved into Russian. Marla
describes the workgroup scene as an enthusiastic “flurry
of raised voices” while participants worked out the details
of a unified approach designed to be a model for four countries,
concurrently.
At times the content of some documents lacks relevancy due
to a difference in local laws. Marla then explains principles
underlying the law, such as the logic and purpose of an incident
command system, or the need for response planers to anticipate
rotational staffing strategies. Four leaders at the January
2005 hospital preparedness workshop in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan had
previously participated in the GHI-sponsored Leadership Training
Workshop for Mitigation Entrepreneurs held in Istanbul, Turkey
in June 2003. Their continued involvement demonstrates how the
project is able to foster a sense of investment, ownership and
responsibility both for the training process and for the documents
developed in this process. Indeed, it was at the Istanbul workshop
in 2003 that particular training documents were first considered
as priorities for translation from English into Russian for
later use in the Central Asian Republics. When the finished
documents are not only successfully adapted, but also fully
adopted, the workshops and training are meeting a primary project
goal. Several weeks after the Bishkek workshop, Marziya Baidulloeva,
city Coordinator for Dushanbe, Tajikistan, returned to the Tajik
Ministry of Health to deliver a copy of the report about the
January 2005 Workshop in Kyrgyzstan. She arrived at the Ministry
in Dushanbe and was pleased to find a group meeting for the
purpose of reviewing the draft Hospital Disaster Preparedness
Handbook in order to provide inputs to the final document.
Marla credits the regional approach of the Central Asia project
with offering several important advantages. First, the involvement
of Turkish consultants who have implemented similar programs
successfully puts workshop participants at ease not only with
the relevance of the activity, but with confidence in the feasibility
of the task. With a 99% literacy rate in all Central Asian countries,
a project based on learning and advocacy through training and
teaching documents enjoys a high rate of success. Plans are
now underway for a spring workshop that will involve fire and
civic protection trainers together with emergency medicine leaders
exploring Community Emergency Response Training adapted for
the region. The previous silos are coming down, for participants
have agreed on a common desire to test, adapt and adopt training
programs for citizen volunteers. Regional participants in this
workshop will work with a model group from Los Angeles, California,
in this upcoming training event.
GHI’s Central Asia project meets several USAID priorities
for funding in the region. By modeling how local governments
and civic society can work together for a common good, the GHI
project in Central Asia also demonstrates effective democracy
and governance. It addresses disaster continuity in the health
and hospital safety while it actively involves participants
in effective educational methods. It uses participatory processes
with civic society, professional organizations, and public and
private stakeholders to explore new ways of sharing knowledge
and to empower them to turn knowledge into action.
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