Oh, how this one makes me want to sing and dance and kiss random strangers! To get a glimpse of the ways everyday people are impacting their local communities all over the world? To be reminded of how many simple ways there are to connect? To share so many good ideas and inspiring stories all in one place? I do believe I’m slowly creating my dream job.

Thanks to all of you who not only submitted stories and photos, but who were a little more perceptive this month to the needs, opportunities and faces within your community. Your contribution is equally valuable. 

For project #3 we’re going to try something totally different. It will require no photography, pose no threat to your introversion, nor add to your already-loaded schedule. All you’ll need is an open heart and a willingness to go deeper. Stay tuned!

Home Work Results – Project #2

Jessica from Barcelona – We are from Australia but have been living in Barcelona, Spain for 10 months now. It is a daily mission to build community here and reaching out to others has been a rewarding and necessary experience for me.

Recent activities that we have been involved in include:

• Joining a meetup.com group to start a community garden. I was going to set up a group myself  ’mañana, mañana’ and I am delighted that someone beat me to it. I want my two year old daughter to see where our food comes from and I long to get my hands covered in soil. I plan to share this with parents in our local online community.
• I introduced the idea of a Mama Bake to my Mother’s group and we will be starting soon. I thought we could not only cook meals for ourselves but for new Mamas with newborns. There is a steady stream of new Mums here in Barcelona who are away from their support networks. It amazes me how many women think it’s a good idea to arrive pregnant in a new country to work out the hospital system, language, establish a community and give birth. I really want to reach out to these women and actively help them by giving them food to stock up their freezer before or after the birth and by making the first move to welcome them.
• I have invited some lovely Argentines who want to practice their (already fabulous) English in return for Spanish conversation over to our casa. I have invited some Mums who were struggling with opportunities to practice their Spanish to come also.
• A friend hosted a craft party for toddlers and Mums on her rooftop terrace. Most people don’t have the luxury of outdoor space here and often can’t be bothered with the mess for one toddler, so it’s a great way for those with terraces to do a community service. We all made a hell of a lot of mess and fun.

Adah from Mooresville, NC – We hosted a neighborhood potluck at our house to finish off spring break the first week in April. I was thinking about doing it anyway, but I was most certainly spurred on by the homework.  It was one of the easiest and nicest parties we have ever had. I invited the surrounding neighbors by email and text message. Everyone brought something for the dinner table. We sat around eating and watching the kids run around the yard. My husband and I just put out table cloths, eatery, and a bucket of beer! So fun. It is already on the books to become a monthly ritual. We had 25 people the first time and we already have additional people we want to include next summer. Spring and summer now have some nice communal meals to punctuate the calendar.

Claire from Portugal — I did not intend to actively participate in the projects (though passively, I did), but this is too great an example of community bonding not to share. As a matter of fact, community ties are still strong in rural Portugal. The story is this: a couple of mounths ago, our most beloved, wonderful old neighbour Manel died at the age of 81. He was a fabulous example of how to live life in a simple yet fulfilling way: tending to his goats, walking the hills, never judging on people, sharing his love of nature and passing on his knowledge. He left behind his wife Idalina. We were truely sad, and went along with the portuguese way of grieving, very different from the way we are used to in Holland. Yet somewhere along the way, we lost it. Of course we had good intentions, of visiting Idalina regularly, as she now was alone. But as it so often goes, with kids to take care of and our own small-scale eco-lodge to run, visits started frequent, and then got postponed and postponed again. But Idalina was not alone. In fact, the whole neighbourhood has been closely looking after her ever since. Visit upon visit, daily phonecalls to check on her, and, the prime example of true compassion: 17-year-old Jorge, son of yet other neighbours, has been sleeping in her house ever since, so that she would not be alone at night. Day after day, for now already more than 2 months, we hear the faithful sound of his motor driving past us on his way to Idalina, around nightfall. And every morning again around 8, we hear him going back home. How many 17-year-olds do you know who would spend their evenings and nights with an old lady? I know none, and i am truely amazed by this display of goodness, love and care. He is an example for me, and, together with your project, it gave me just that little push to go there today. Of course, we were warmly welcomed, we always are. As a fresh widow, there is nothing finer than a little distraction from her sorrow, which we did bring — the four of us — and will bring regularly from now on.

Karen from Austin, TX -- We cultivated community right in our backyard last weekend. Our house is on a little over an acre and there are plenty of trees and scrubby undergrowth. We invited some dear friends over for a camp out in the backyard. We pitched two tents, made smores around a fire, and sat up talking around the fire until late. In the morning we had coffee around the fire again and laughed about how early the roosters started crowing. It was a great way to further the bond with some people we love. And it was so EASY!

Danica from Kansas City, MO – Yesterday was a community-full day! I started the day helping out with a work day at the community garden down the street where I rent a plot. We did some weeding and working on making the compost pile less of a mess. When I got home, the neighbor’s kids came over to play while their dad grilled some ribs for a communal lunch. A few other neighbors stopped by for a rib or a beer or just to say hello while the kids played. One of these neighbors decided the party shouldn’t stop there, so he rode his bike to the store to buy some more meat for the grill for dinner. We pitched in by throwing together a spinach salad with whatever we could find in the pantry. By the end of it all, this introvert was more than ready to retreat to the comfort of her own home, but the joy of being among friends-who-are-neighbors on a beautiful spring day cannot be denied!

Liz from Massachusetts – We’ve lived in our current home city for 3 years and have struggled the entire time with finding community. Where we used to live we had that deep sense of connectedness to place and people and though folks moved in and out of the community all the time, everyone fit and everyone was welcome.  In our new(ish) home, we just haven’t gotten past making some acquaintances, though lovely they are to have.  So with our son turning one and being that we both love parties, we decided to throw a big bash and invite family and friends and neighbors and acquaintances!  It made me a bit nervous to mix lots of group of folks together, but also excited.  We dropped invitations around the neighborhood, invited all my family (my husband’s is too far away), and little by little so many people RSVP’d that they would be there!  We cleaned and decorated and made way too much food and just welcomed a whole bunch of chaos into our home and it was GREAT.  So many kids ranging from 2 months to 4 years old played and ran around and beat the pinata and sang Happy Birthday.  My family got to meet my neighbors and my midwife (and her mom!) and my very random collection of friends (I think an acquaintance can be upgraded to “friend” once they come on over to a birthday party!).  While we still pine for our old community (and plot and plan how we’ll return there one day), this experience made me feel a little bit better about where we are now.

Eleanor from Hendersonville, NC – The women I work with, at a Christian preschool, have made a special focus this year on supporting women who have been rescued from the sex trade industry around the world. This is one of our projects, sewing baby blankets for a clinic in Uganda that serves many of these women.

Dara from Flagstaff, AZ  — I had been wanting to do a “neighborhood forest cleanup” day anyway, and this was the perfect inspiration to actually follow through on it. I posted it as an event for 3 community groups I am a part of (one is a homeschooling group, one is a mom’s group, and one is a neighborhood group), as well as posted signs at 8 neighborhood trailheads. I was pretty convinced my daughter and I would be the ONLY ones to show up, but we weren’t! A man with 5 boys (not brothers, they were friends and cousins of each other) who had seen a sign that I posted at a trailhead, a married couple who had also seen a posted sign at a trailhead, and 2 women who saw my posting on two different community-group sites all showed up! All in all  there were 6 adults and 9 kids. We also ended up with support from the city because they were doing a month-long Earth Day effort of volunteer trash pickup (pure coincidence…I did not realize they were doing that until I talked with someone at the city about getting trash bags and gloves.) We separated out the recyclables from the trash. I took the recyclables with me to put in our bin, and the city picked up the rest of the trash to add to the “Tower of Trash” they have on display this month.

Milinda from Austin, TX (Sponsor – Lawless Revolution Wear, friend and general badass) – It’s still very much in the “working/ brewing” stage as far as results but it has been very rewarding and motivating to start this assignment. I have a fascination/addiction to Mexico and a dream of once again living on the beach with my family. After a huge life transformation and a dash of failure at my first attempt, the drive and determination has grown fierce in my life. I have taken the project of reaching out to all of the good people I know in that part of the world and have cast my net as far as plausible opportunities that could get us back to Mexico. It’s a tall order, I know, but I have gotten some responses and learned a lot about what really is important to me and my family. My main concern is finding a job or a more realistic way to bring in an income while living abroad. Not only have I reached out to my amazing friends, I have written many hotels, schools, etc. to proactively find an opportunity. On a successful note, I am sending my art to an awesome little trailer on the beach where I will have a presence in the place of which I dream about. I feel we are in the midst of the eye of the storm and have not made any definitive decisions….yet. This little exercise has taught me to be bold, thankful and fierce when it comes to what you want out of life and that when you throw your energy out into the Universe, you never know what might come back. It’s also taught me there is true power behind ideas and that if you want something bad enough, you just might get it.

As for my own project – Ironically, this month was so rich with community I hardly needed (or had time) to cultivate it. Our run of houseguests allowed for weeks of cohabitation, which is the ultimate in my book…

Our time in San Cristóbal was a refreshing reminder of why cultivating community is so very worth it…

Our good friends adopted our old chicken coop. They disassembled it on the day we moved, hauled it home with two hens under arm and reassembled it, only this time with a grand vista. Latina (Tina, for short), the remaining hen, must have done something right in a past life.

…and most recently, when I hosted a brunch and all those who showed were my single, childless friends, I was reminded that they need it as much as I do, that community in the most organic sense isn’t near as segregated as we tend to make it and that we all have something rich to offer one another, no matter how different our walks of life.

That afternoon, I took the remaining muffins to our neighbors. I chose these particular folks because they are just across the street from us, because I hear a tiny baby over there on occasion and because it just felt right. On the one hand I didn’t get very far (the toothless grandmother came suspiciously to the door, accepted my offering with nary a thanks and disappeared again before I could even ask her name), but on the other hand, my girls experienced a unique experience of giving, I did receive a giant grin from the 20-something year old mom nursing her baby in a hammock and I got a quick peek inside their one-room house. Illuminated and “cooled” only through the open doorway in which I stood, at least six people seem to be sharing two hammocks (hung across the width of the room), a pile of bedding on the floor, a tiny table and handful of mismatched chairs. No wonder the street culture is so rich here – you can barely breath inside some of these houses.

I’ll continue to keep my eye out for the mom, to make conversation with her kids who occasionally lose a ball over our wall and hopefully some sort of relationship will eventually form. Though difficult to reconcile, I am always grateful for reminders as to how good I have it, that there’s so much more to their standoffishness than I realize and that though cultural walls are clearly as real as the physical ones, they’re still just walls constructed by fellow humans.

Little did I know there are at least four homes in what I thought was a single-family house across the street.

Again, I appreciate everyone’s comments, thoughtfulness and connectedness over the past month and I look forward to continued conversation about community, its many rewards and its varied obstacles.

Until next time, get out there and meet your neighbors!