She Was Not Being Taught Something New. She Was Reconsidering Something Familiar

Advice becomes useful at the moment a woman compares it against what she has already lived.

She was pregnant and already caring for two children. In a community-group meeting on 22 November 2011 she mentioned that her children had been immunised and that she had received vaccination during this pregnancy. When the discussion moved to infant feeding, she explained that she had breastfed before, but not in the immediate and exclusive way being described.

This is not a story about replacing ignorance with knowledge. She arrived with experience, practices and questions. What the meeting created was a place to set that experience beside health information about starting breastfeeding soon after birth and avoiding other feeds in the early months.

A field animator visited the household again on 10 December and they went through the purpose of immediate and exclusive breastfeeding. She said she intended to follow it after this birth.

The old report casts the animator as the main actor. The information only became meaningful because she considered it, related it to what she had already done twice, and decided.

After giving birth to a girl she initiated breastfeeding within the hour and intended to continue exclusively. Both were healthy at the time of compilation.

Then she began encouraging other women in the village to start and sustain breastfeeding. That last step is what gives the story reach. Advice from a project facilitator entered the community’s own network of knowledge through a mother who could speak from experience.

Group discussion, household decision, peer communication. Change lasts when knowledge stops belonging to an organisation and starts being interpreted and passed on by the people using it.

Change lasts when knowledge stops belonging to an organisation.