How I Learned to Communicate the Hard Way

Communication is a two-way process. I learned it the hard way.

Ten years ago, I worked with a group of women from Golfo de Santa Clara, a small fishing town in the northern Gulf of California, Mexico. My colleague Claudia and I were interested in land protection. While visiting the community, we realized that plastic bottles were a real problem and had an idea. We had a conversation with a group of women and discussed a business model for them to develop. They agreed, and together we submitted a proposal to pay for their time for picking up the plastic bottles from the streets and buy a press machine. Once we figured out how to make the machine work, they sold the plastic blocks to a local plastic recycler. The project was a success. The state government invited the group of women, my colleague and me to talk about it. Since I wanted them to be the ones leading the presentation, I told the women I would give some recommendations at the end of the talk. At the end of my speech, I said, "always remember to reduce, recycle, and reuse. But today I want to talk about refuse. We want you to start refusing plastic. We don't want plastic bottles on the streets," and before finishing my sentence, I felt someone nudged me, I turned my head, and Doña Silvia, one of the ten women on the group, was looking at me with a frown. I covered the microphone, and she whispered: "Without plastic bottles on the streets, our business is over." And she was right; I didn't understand their real needs. Yes, they were worried about the plastic problem, but they had a more significant need, they needed an income to send their kids to school. I wasn't listening.

Communication is also about social and cultural context. Years later, I started working with fishermen in Ejido Campodónico in the northern Gulf of California. They showed interest in signing an agreement for the conservation of marine species, but they didn't know where to start. We met with stakeholders, local and regional government employees, packers, and carriers, NGO's directors, and funders as a starting point. We would meet and agree on something, and fishermen would ask for changes during the next meeting. They would go home and came back with changes. That happened two or three times. We were missing something. It turned out the fishermen's wives were making recommendations on the agreement. They were the ones with the knowledge about how to spend the earnings and where it was feasible to save some money to put their husbands' ideas into action. I underestimated the power of the fishermen's wives. The fact is that I didn't understand the socio-cultural context and dynamics of the community.

More recently, I worked with teams partnering to raise awareness and help communities on environmental and social justice issues. How can someone make you feel the frustration of families going through an eviction process if you don't how it feels? How can I explain the feeling of being overpowered if I haven't experienced it before? How can I make you understand that we live in a system where food production, soil recovery, and water sources are interrelated if you haven't experienced nature? That's our challenge as communicators.

Communication covers different aspects, but mainly, the ability to express concepts, thoughts, feelings, facts, and opinions. But because communication is a two-way process, we need to learn to listen first. The rest would follow.