Making Sense of A Census

CENSUS DIALOGUE

We led everyone in a very interesting discussion on census as a way to introduce the idea of creating a cordel. First questions were asked to generate a dialogue about experiences with census and to gain an understanding of the type of questions that were asked, by whom and for what purposes. We let them know that we would identify a group question for the community to ponder in a public space. After we collectively gained an understanding of local census taking we asked why census collections occur and what often gets lost in a census when the emphasis is on fact collection.

THE UNACCOUNTED FOR QUESTIONS

We asked students to think about what they might like to know about their community that never gets asked. At first students struggled with this idea but after a few examples, they came up with some wonderful questions:

1. Where do you hide your most beautiful things?
2. How many stories exist about ghosts?
3. Why are people afraid of ghosts?
4. Have you forgotten the stories of the past?
5. Why has the president of Honduras failed us?
6. How many sincere people live in this community?
7. Would you die for love?
8. How many people here need true love?
9. How many people would like to forget their past?
10. Who here doesn’t like to dance?

QUESTION ELECTIONS

We pooled all our questions together and took a vote. Everyone could vote twice among four different questions. It was down to two questions. Everyone could only vote then on one. The question that won: HOW MANY PEOPLE NEED TRUE LOVE? We brainstormed words and images related to this question to prepare us for the poetry writing.