Critical Questioning of Everyday Habits

In Palestine, hotels are rarely booked by business or holiday travellers, but often
for workshops and trainings. Trainings are a product that international cooperation
organisations much like to sell. Most probably they are the ‘best-seller’
among the non-material products, a typical commodity.
The training process reflected and documented in the present field report contrasts
favourably to these standard concepts. It is a piece of hand-crafted, tailormade
work. That is why it is so special.
Trainings are not an end in themselves, but always just a means to achieve an
end. In civil conflict transformation, this end is a process of social change. Only
if trainings are not transacted as a non-recurring event, but are understood to be
a process to be implemented carefully and precisely in such a change process,
there is a high probability that they will be effective. ‘Effective’ means here that
they support and promote the change process.
This field report describes how an effective training process can be set up, what
has to be considered, where the limitations are, and how to deal with many
other problems. The documented project focused on the work with women in
rural areas of Palestine. However, the experiences gained are also valuable and
essential for many other contexts, even beyond the Palestine borders. We would
like to warmly recommend its reading at least to all those who work with training
processes within the framework of the BMZ instrument „Civil Peace Service“.
What becomes apparent, too, when reading this report is that the trainers
Rimonda Mansour and Ulrike Ramlow have followed the Tavistock tradition
(which has been somewhat forgotten, though unjustifiedly) in that they skilfully
combined the systemic approach with the analytical, group dynamic one though
these are often opposed to each other.
The text contains references to this approach repeatedly, including hidden,
further knowledge and experiences to be discovered. Therefore, giving an insider
tip to all our ‘trainer colleagues’ in the CPS, we recommend to contact the
two trainers directly.
Dirk Sprenger