Invisible Children Participant-Observation

Victoria, one of the CA’s in my dorm, invited me to go with her to distribute Change-for-Change jars for Invisible Children. The point of the jars is that people put spare change in these jars to help raise money for Invisible Children, a club that fights against the Lord’s Resistance Army and its use of child soldiers in Uganda. I had watched the latest Invisible Children movie recently, but I had never done anything to help them out before. Victoria and I met a few other people in SLIC, where we divided up a big box of already-labeled jars into smaller, more manageable bags that we could take to the various dorms. Victoria and I then took some bags and flyers and trekked back to Grossmont and Fairmont, where we delivered a jar and flyer to every room that opened their door to us and allowed us to share a bit about what we were doing.

I was surprised by how almost all of the doors in Grossmont were closed, which increased the awkward factor as I had to knock on each and every door in Grossmont and wait for someone to answer, rather than the open-door community I’m used to seeing in Fairmont that would have enabled me to have easier access to the people I was trying to talk to. The whole event was a bit uncomfortable for me, especially since I’m not used to going door to door talking to strangers, promoting a topic that I don’t know very much about, all while clumsily trying to manage a flimsy bag filled with jars in one hand and a handful of fliers in the other hand. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, and that uncertainty was noticeable to the people I was trying to talk to, who likewise responded in an unsure manner. I feel like I was very unclear when I was trying to present my message and inform people of the cause I was helping out with, which made me incredibly self-conscious and unconfident in the way I spoke. This is not a part of my personality that I am strangers with. Rather, it is a part of me that I am working on changing to enable me to go out of my comfort zone and do this sort of thing more frequently.

Doing this activity with a key informant made it possible for me to have a better sense of what it was we were doing and how the evening was going to run. Victoria directed me as to where we were going to go, and she instructed me on the key points to say to the people I was handing jars out to. We went to one floor of Grossmont to pass out jars together, so I was able to hear how she talked to people and informed them of Invisible Children. She answered my questions and helped me wrap things up at the end, taking the remaining jars and fliers from me and informing me that within the month someone will need to come by to pick up the collected change and pass out more jars, making this a monthly activity.

Other than the few minutes where I was observing Victoria knock on people’s doors and talk with them, I was fully involved in this activity, doing just about the same thing that she was. Participating in this event gave me a better understanding of the preparation and face-to-face interaction needed to raise awareness and money for an organization and cause such as Invisible Children. If I had just observed someone in Invisible Children, I might not have completely internalized the hysteria of the co-president as she became overwhelmed at the daunting task of knocking on every single dorm room door. I also might not have felt the discomfort of talking to random people while dragging along my rather large bag of interesting objects. By participating in this activity rather than simply observing it, I was able to fully experience what the people who do this on a regular basis go through. I expect that the awkwardness that I felt vastly decreases as one becomes more comfortable doing such a thing as this, or if a person is more outgoing than I am, but the motions are still basically the same.

A questionnaire or survey would not have given anyone an adequate sense of the happenings of this activity, the feeling of going door-to-door, or the awkwardness of not knowing how to respond and react to certain people. A questionnaire or survey could, however, inform a researcher how many of the people contacted would do anything with the jars they were given, or how effective they thought this method to be. A written report could also give statistics on how many people were passing out jars, how many people were previously involved in Invisible Children and thus already had a jar, and how many jars were given out. While all of these things are important things to consider, it is important to get a feel for how an event is actually run, rather than examination of the outcomes alone.