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Community-based communication with Tukuy Pacha
Company: Tukuy Pacha
Supervisor: Julio Arze
Project length: June – August 2018
Location: Cochabamba, Bolivia
Range of work: User interviews, observational analysis, website development, graphic design, print production
Languages: English, Spanish
Overview
In 2018, I had the opportunity to engage in community development work through the Buffett Institute at Northwestern. I worked as an intern for the Foundation of Sustainable Development, placed in Cochabamba, Bolivia at Tukuy Pacha – a nongovernmental organization created to help disabled members of rural communities in Bolivia take control of their rights. I worked with a group of three other interns, but was personally responsible for overhauling the website and designing physical therapy cards for Tukuy Pacha patients, as well as physical therapy guides for community volunteers.
Outcome
My team and I brought 250 physical therapy cards to production for Tukuy Pacha’s community members and created the first Spanish/English translation for their website.
Process
Arriving in Cochabamba, my team and I had almost no idea what to expect. We had looked up Tukuy Pacha online, but had not found much. So we figured we’d learn on the job. And we did.
The wall outside of Tukuy Pacha, painted by a local artist.
Tukuy Pacha is an organization committed to defending vulnerable communities. Specifically, they work with disabled communities in the rural municipalities surrounding Cochabamba. How they break it down is as follows:
Rights and empowerment. A lawyer works to digest Bolivian law and make it understandable to these communities.
Physical therapy. A physical therapist treating patients in the remote municipalities.
Communication and funding. The head of the organization working to find funding to expand the organization and provide more services.
We started by going on site visits with the staff of Tukuy Pacha, exploring the six different municipalities surrounding Cochabamba. We observed the physical therapist, Paola, to see what her work was like in the field.
One of my team members heading to a house visit in the municipality of Punata.
Immediately we noticed a few things:
Stigma around disability was a barrier to receiving care. A lot of the patients we visited did not have their disability IDs (carnets). This meant they were not able to get any health services, or were mistreated when they sought treatment. We spoke to the Tukuy Pacha employees and learned this was a persistent problem, with stigma around disability leading to doctors refusing to prioritize these patients.
Official healthcare documents were linguistically misaligned with community needs. Most of the municipalities we visited spoke Quechua. It was hard for Tukuy Pacha employees to communicate to their patients and even harder for their patients to get a full understanding of the law or their rights since documents did not come in their native language – only Spanish.
Insufficient funding constantly loomed over all initiatives. Tukuy Pacha was constantly under financial duress and did not have the proper funding to carry out all of its programming or hire new employees. This kept its impact small.
After in-depth interviews with the employees of Tukuy Pacha and house visits to patients in the municipalities, we set to work understanding where we could be most helpful as American interns at this organization. It was an exercise in calling out our privileges and position, and using that to align with organizational needs to find where we could be most genuinely helpful, rather than harmful, in the limited time we would be present in the community.
What we landed on was a series of smaller projects that would aim at the larger goal of enhancing the visibility of Tukuy Pacha, both internally and externally.
Internally, we set out to ensure patients had ways to understand the services Tukuy Pacha could provide in formats that align with their lifestyle and resources. Externally, we wanted to increase Tukuy Pacha’s online presence to create an easier way for the organization to acquire international funding.
At the beginning of the summer, we laid out goals and guidelines which we would follow to fruition by the end of the summer.
My responsibilities were as follows:
Develop and launch the website
Design the physical therapy guides
Create physical therapy cards for patients to track their individual progress with Tukuy Pacha
Develop an institutional powerpoint for Tukuy Pacha to use as a pitch deck for funding
Since the organization had previously worked with a designer who had implemented new brand guidelines and a design for the website, most of my job was taking these guidelines to production and presenting content in digestible, informative ways through these guidelines
With huge amounts of support from the Tukuy Pacha team, we were able to implement all of the below projects before we left Cochabamba:
New, live website (Pictured: screenshot of the new web page, accessed August 24, 2018)
Physical therapy cards (Pictured: front of a patient physical therapy card)
Physical therapy cards (Pictured: back of a patient physical therapy card featuring habit tracker to track progress)
Physical therapy guides (Pictured: the printed guides, which were distributed to community volunteers who helped reach patients further from the city)
We left Tukuy Pacha having:
Researched, designed and printed new field guides for the local volunteers who would help with physical therapy visits
Printed physical therapy cards for patients to record their progress
Launched a new website, in both Spanish and English (at tukuypacha.com)
Designed a new rights (derechos) page and held three workshops (talleres)
It’s hard to talk about what I learned at Tukuy Pacha from a strictly professional point of view because so much more of what I learned came from observing personal relationships, mutual aid in action, and casual conversations with the community members and volunteers.
I learned a lot about Bolivian political infrastructure, and how that maps onto accessibility within healthcare, as well as the struggles of funding for a nongovernmental organization. I was also able to observe and take part in grassroots efforts toward community development, to see how intensely government services misalign with real needs. My experience at Tukuy Pacha taught me genuine problem-solution alignment, and how to get creative about it when resources aren’t available. I carry these lessons through my work to this day, taking time to observe, engage and pressure test solutions in practice.