Asking questions about questions

In 2002, working with PATH in Kenya, I wrote a monograph called The Continuum of Enquiry. At that time, conventional wisdom within HIV prevention programs was that behavior change was driven by clearly articulated and communicated messages. Counter-intuitively, I felt that personal change was driven more by the questions a person asked than the answers they received. As long as a person perceived a distance from the virus, their risk perception would remain low, and their information needs casual. My monograph suggested a framework for looking at how a person’s questions about AIDS and survival might change as they felt themselves at increasing risk. But how to make a person ask better questions?

I noticed that questions became more heartfelt and profound briefly whenever moving real-life experiences were shared. Based on this observation, our projects developed games and processes such as Figureheads, Storytelling, and Timeline for improving the depth and power of experience sharing. To capture the questions that welled up, I instituted a process called harvesting questions as well as frameworks for analyzing the questions.

Questions have acquired new significance in the post-Google world, and sophisticated algorithms have been developed, for instance, to track emerging flu outbreaks based on patterns of Google queries.

FINDING CONNECTORS: In 2003, coping with a peer education program that was bent under the weight of too few trainers and rapidly growing community audiences, I developed an Excel spreadsheet that would enable us to identify naturally connected individuals in a community by identifying his or her pathways into the community. Individuals recruited using this spreadsheet participated in dialogue groups that would reflect critically upon reproductive health predicaments and their solutions. The method leveraged naturally networked individuals in a community, and increased their ability to understand, analyze, and develop solutions for reproductive health dilemmas and then communicate about it to the community.

LEARNINGS FROM THE AFARS:

The Afars are a 2000-year-old tribe of pastoralists in Ethiopia with whom I worked while developing a communication strategy for an international NGO that needed to improve their health-seeking behavior. To my surprise, I learned that the Afars followed a sophisticated system of oral communication called dagu, which enabled them to identify potential threats to Afar survival well in advance, and communicate across the tribe about steps to avert the crisis. Long before NGOs arrived, the Afars had identified learned about HIV and AIDS, and set up strong community mechanisms for prevention. My monograph (alongside) describes what I learned from the Afars.

1998-2008

Working with deaf Indian youth who could neither sign nor mouth, I developed Figureheads, a role-play based process to stimulate experience sharing, as a research tool.

Developed Splash! in Kenya, as a dialogue process that could empower the many through the few. High quality facilitation with selected community members led to behavior change which was magnified using traditional media like theatre.

Developed a spreadsheet formula for evaluating a community individual’s connectivity by enumerating his or her pathways into the community.

Developed Storytelling, a tiered dialogue process that enabled profound critical reflection of risk and behavior among community members in a dialogue group.

Developed Timeline, a process that used role play to dramatically sharpen a person’s experience of future consequences of current behavior.

At age 19, I worked as a shoeshine boy on Delhi streets to write about their hardships. My impersonation stories won me a national award by the time I was 22.

MICKEY is a Minimally Invasive Curriculum for HIV driven by self-learning through translation.

As a Macarthur Population Fellow in India, I developed a non-verbal, sign-language independent reproductive health curriculum for deaf Indian youth.

My first fiction novel, The Book of Answers, is currently in submissions with publishers in the US and UK.

Magnet Theatre uses half-told stories and dialogue with the audience to deepen the understanding of HIV risk, and improve the quality of community’s questions.