Field notes from villages, methods we're testing, things we got wrong, and the occasional argument with ourselves. Written by the practitioners, not the comms team.
A note from our latest Pasal expansion in Mullaitivu: what we heard when we promised, in writing, to bring no notebook, no clipboard, no questionnaire. And the strange, slow thing the women's collective started doing in week eight that we never would have proposed. An argument for arriving empty-handed.
Continue reading →On the difference between an installation and an intervention. A short defence of the boring, weather-tested kind of work — and what the Pasal SMS reminder system looked like after its first cyclone.
Notes from year three of the Karam cooperative in Vavuniya. A cooperative is not a startup; the fastest way to ruin it is to forget that. On dignity at the negotiation table, and why we built a fourteen-day payment rule into the constitution.
Twelve failed pilots from across the Northern programme — the schools attendance app that nobody used, the chatbot that broke Tamil, the participatory budgeting tool the council quietly shelved. Documented, honestly, with what we'd do differently. The field needs more of this.
Eight Saturdays of watching what Class 4 chooses to read when no one is grading them. A long memo to ourselves about reading-for-pleasure as an act of post-conflict imagination. (Spoiler: they pick the shortest book on the shelf, then the longest, then re-read the short one.)
A short defence of unfashionable technology. In Mannar's coastal villages a phone tree is not infrastructure-poverty — it is infrastructure. The Kadal cyclone-warning system, version 0.3, made of voice-notes and human relays.
Pasal facilitators talk about what gets lost — and what is sometimes kept — when sorrow has to be translated between Tamil, Sinhala, and the silences both languages share. With a glossary of words we now refuse to translate at all.
An open letter on our four-year minimum partnership rule, what we lost by enforcing it (one large grant, two consulting briefs, a board member), and what we kept. We'd still write the rule the same way today.
A day with the Maatram peer educators on the demining border. What thirteen-year-olds remember, what they invent, what they teach their cousins, and the small thing every district education officer should know about how children share warnings with each other.