I have too many projects. I have too many lists of too many projects. Then I started this blog thinking with all the experiences I’ve had in the past and all the ideas I’ve thought about over the recent few years that certainly to complete at least one post per week would be absolutely and positively simple. If all else failed, I have old posts from my Facebook page and letters to the editor from years past I could easily add in to fill some space. Easy!

Then I let it go a week. Then two. Then it was a month. Then it’s 2019 all of a sudden and it’s almost been a year since I last posted something. It’s over a year since I started this thing… I had to renew the domain name otherwise risk losing it and all previous efforts would be for nothing.

So I had a choice – return and try again, or forget about it.

I renewed the domain. So here I am.

I have been thinking about this site quite a lot, if that means anything to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about the years I was involved with some local community development groups. I’ve been thinking about what that word community means these days to young people especially. I’ve been thinking about political systems and how ignorant we can be about how things really work. And I’ve also been thinking about how when we think we know how things work, it is quite likely we still don’t really know. We can never know what we don’t know, and there are lots of things happening in the world that we will never be told about.  Even as connected as we are, we are just as disconnected.

I thought, when I first decided to create this site, I would write about my experiences and just type and type until the answers I was seeking came to me, like some kind of divine revelation. The question, I believed, was about how to get people involved, and keep them engaged enough. How to get people to care about their communities enough to want to volunteer their valuable time and donate their hard-earned money. It was about, at the local level at least, what kind of political systems and policies would be most effective.

The rabbit hole, however, goes much deeper than that. The dichotomy between the good of the community and our individualism is both necessary and at times conflicting. How far do we go in being part of a community? Are we a collective of individuals or are we (moving toward becoming) a hive mind?

We’re products of evolution but are we still evolving? How does our ancestry – our ancient primordial ancestry – affect our ability to participate in modern society? Is technology a part of our evolution?

Side note. I remember many, many years ago it seemed, I was living on a farm in Thurso, Quebec, and a friend and I were tossing a Frisbee around and we were drinking beer and I was starting to feel it quite a bit, and at one point I dived for the Frisbee and missed and landed in some tall grass. When I got up I realized I had lost my glasses. I’m nearsighted, so our game was over and I searched and searched but couldn’t find them. I was pissed off and drunk and I remember getting upset and saying something to the effect that “if this was a couple thousand years ago I probably would’ve been eaten by a tiger by now.” In other words, I was a genetic oddball who didn’t deserve to be alive. I may have actually been crying at one point. Alcohol is a depressant after all!

But seriously, we’re getting to the point where wearable tech – or even implantable tech – may become commonplace within our lifetimes. Medical breakthroughs at the genetic level are becoming reality. At what point does simple tool-making and medical knowledge grow to become not just a product of our evolution but a factor of it?

If we have the knowledge at our fingertips – or faster than that, accessible by just thinking about it via an implant connected to the hive mind of the internet – what use are other people to us?

I’m being a little facetious, of course. We need family. We need friends. We long for community. But again, what does that look like? What will it look like fifty years from now?

Are we meant to be living in a world of several billion people? Are we meant to be living in groups of more than a few hundred? Are we meant to specialize beyond hammering iron and grinding wheat and spinning flax? I mean, when someone smears feces on a canvas and calls it art, are we really evolving as a species? Maybe we can go too far! Maybe the nature of humans is that we have, and we always will, push things to their limit.

I’m torn between two precious worlds:

The past, where things were hand-made, and of superior quality, and lasted for a long time, and could be fixed and parts easily made and replaced. Where knowledge was passed from generation to generation. Where vocal conversation between two or more people was not so much an art form as but an involuntary, autonomic function of our daily lives.

And the Future, where human syndromes of poverty, disease and war are eliminated by technologies and political systems that benefit all of us, and all the Earth, and beyond. I’m a Roddenberry fan, if you hadn’t guessed, and I look at that vision of the future as an ideal to aspire to.

The challenge is, of course, the present. Today is as disposable to us, it seems, as almost every cheaply made item we lay our hands on, because, we believe, tomorrow will come.

How much longer can we go on expecting it will? For some of us, tomorrow won’t, and we just don’t know it yet.

Wow, this got kind of dark all of a sudden! Didn’t mean that. I’m usually quite hopeful and optimistic. The future I want is just like that Star Trek-y one in many ways, but lacking a replicator I’m quite content building things with my hands, cooking food we grew ourselves and wearing a sweater my wife knit herself.

I don’t know if any of this made any sense at all, but hey, I’ve been on hiatus for almost a year from this! I’ll get more focused as I dig back into it. I just needed to sit down and write again finally.

Live long and prosper!

-dw

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, it’s Sunday afternoon, raining slightly outside, and I started this blog last week and need to post something today or else this idea of mine will go absolutely nowhere. I mentioned last week all the previous letters and notes I’ve written, so I could easily just post an old letter to the editor I may have sent to a local paper at one point, or post one of my many old Facebook notes relating to the subject, but here I am standing over the woodstove in the kitchen frying up some bologna and, all of a sudden, I’m thinking about my time in Botswana, back in 2005.

I said last week I’d like to talk about when I was a child and how I was witness to the efforts of my own parents as volunteers, whether with the Home & School Association or local Kinsmen Club, and I certainly will, but please note it seems this blog of mine may not precisely follow any sort of chronological order. It reminds me of the first time I kept a journal and I made a point of picking any random page every time I made an entry until it was full.

In 2005 I was very lucky to be sent to Botswana on a Canada Corps internship through Xtending Hope, a partnership between the Town of Antigonish, ST. FX University and the Coady International Institute. It was set up in response to Stephen Lewis’ call for action to assist African nations hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Xtending Hope partnered with organizations in the two nations hardest hit at the time, Rwanda and Botswana. I applied for an internship (one of two; one to each country), which was 14 or 15 weeks, and was sent to Francistown, a township in the northeast of Botswana close to the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo. A good friend from university was sent to Rwanda.

Prior to this, however, we were off to Ottawa, for three days at the Centre for Intercultural Learning, or something like that, to learn about how to communicate effectively and respectfully in a new culture, how to recognize culture shock, both going to a new place, and returning home, and a lot of discussion about icebergs (there’s always more under the surface). I found this training session very helpful and of course we were there with about twenty others from across Canada who were being sent to various places around the world. It made the prospect of being alone in the middle of southern Africa a lot more bearable.

Xtending Hope was also sending a nurse from the local hospital who wanted to volunteer in Botswana, and she spent the three and a half months at a hospice outside Gaborone, Botswana’s capital city. Traveling together was, again, beneficial to me, as I didn’t have to feel alone on the journey. I remember vividly our twelve-hour stopover in London on the way when we took the tube downtown and found ourselves in Piccadilly Circus, and we ate Fish & Chips in a little pub on one of the side streets. I never sleep on planes so I was up all that night, all day in London, and then again for the flight to Johannesburg, and then from there to Gaborone. When we were picked up at the airport I was a complete zombie.

The next day, however, I was feeling excitement and trepidation as I boarded the bus for Francistown. It was a four-hour journey, and I was told I would be met by the people with whom I would be staying with, a family originally from Zimbabwe, a man who worked in refrigeration and air conditioning, and his wife who was a school teacher, and their two children. It was a long bus ride, perhaps the longest of my life. For the first time since learning I was going to Francistown by myself I now felt all alone. What really sucked was that I made sure to drink a lot of water and I had my Nalgene bottle with me, of course (they were all the rage at the time) and about thirty minutes into the journey I remember turning back to look for the washroom and discovering there was no washroom on this bus. There were numerous stops along the way but only at the halfway point, in Mahalapye, could you get off the bus to go find the washrooms. So I made sure not to drink a bloody drop of anything any time I had to take a bus ride in Botswana after that!

This could turn into a book if I keep going like this, so I’ll just say that I will indeed come back to a variety of points about my time in Botswana that I’d like to talk about. For example, I absolutely fell in love with my adoptive family and their children and I don’t think I’ve ever felt as peaceful in my life as I did living with them, praying with them, and laughing with them. I also arrogantly thought I was handling the transition into this new culture better than I really was, and I fell into a deep despair and found comfort in alcohol and by withdrawing into myself. And when it came to trying to make a difference (that’s what I was there for wasn’t I?) I became profoundly frustrated and angry, knowing little then about how naïve I really was.

What I wanted to talk about today was community, and how in this little nondescript concrete brick building, for a short time I became part of a community there called Kgotla ya Balekane (KYB). KYB was an adult recreation centre (fitness centre) for people living with or dealing with HIV/AIDS. In order to be a member you did not need to have HIV/AIDS but they required you get tested. The idea was to promote testing and reduce the stigma around testing. When I arrived the gym had one working exercise bicycle, some free-weights, and a number of workout machines, bikes and treadmills that were inoperable. The building was clean but bare. It had a manager, who viewed my arrival as an opportunity for him to take a vacation, and there were four members who dropped by almost every day.

I began by fixing two more of the bikes. The belts were broken so I bought two automotive belts from an auto shop and one of the members brought in some tools for me to use. The weight machines seemed in good condition but the cables were all snapped, so I bought some clothesline and started stringing them together again, and again another member helped me to hold the weights in place as I tightened the new cables. Then I tackled the treadmill. It just required a fuse, which was impossible to find but a member was able to take a household fuse of a close enough amperage and wire it into the circuit to get it going, and the track itself was torn, so I sewed it together with some thin wire (like snare wire). I also bought three large mirrors we hung them on the wall. Next thing you know the members were helping me tidy up a few things and rearrange the equipment, and voila… within a week we had a few new members coming in.

Almost weekly we were adding people and at one point the gym had people there almost all day long, young and old, men and women. What was funny was that no matter what day it was during the week, at the same time every day everybody stopped and went into the sitting room and turned on the television to watch an American soap opera. Every single person. I don’t remember if it was Days of Our Lives or Bold and the Beautiful, but I remember sitting down with my cup of rooibos and watching it daily with everybody else. And really getting into it too!

I was working out myself, feeling great, joining sometimes in the evening aerobics sessions that were led by one of the members. Their motivation became my own motivation, and for what I believed was a sad situation coming into the country I had a difficult time seeing anything but hopefulness and positivity. I didn’t know it at the time but I was about to crash hard as reality began to set in.

What I learned though is that all these people, from a variety of backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances, they were able to come together and form a community that they truly cared about based on only one thing they all knew they had in common: they all had been tested for HIV. Nobody was required to disclose the results of their tests. For all anyone knew, nobody was HIV positive. For all anyone knew, everybody was. What I found thought-provoking was the fact that it didn’t matter. They were just a bunch of people wanting to improve their lives by becoming and remaining fit and healthy. I was privileged to bring my past experience as an auto mechanic and backyard tinkerer to the group to show that repairing the equipment was possible just by using readily available materials (a background in Asset-Based Community Development also helped) but it was that drive and positivity from the members that made it all happen.

While I eventually had difficulties adjusting, and we’ll get to that eventually, I also made it through those difficulties. Botswana is a fascinating country and what I think made things a lot easier for me was that since it was once a British colony most people speak English, and the towns and cities are built in the sort of familiar way I was used to, with such amenities as supermarkets almost exactly as you would find here at home (maybe better because you can buy warthog bacon and antelope chops right beside your ground beef and chicken breasts). And one day I was browsing the aisles and I came across a small sausage-like package labelled “Paloney”. Yes, with a P.

I picked up two of them, I found some yellow mustard and some bread and I almost raced back to the kitchen at KYB. I longed for that taste of something familiar. I was basically eating chicken and rice or chicken and millet two or three times a day and the thought of a little taste of home was bringing a tear to my eye. You know that feeling when you put something into your mouth and you expect one taste but it’s not that taste. Well, Paloney, or at least the Paloney I bought that day, was nothing at all like I was expecting. So I went back and bought some chicken and rice. And that’s how I managed to start reflecting on my time in Bots today while frying up some ‘paloney’ for breakfast.

Welcome to Community From Within, my new blog which will outline my personal journey in the realm of community development based in a small (tiny) village on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, Canada, but also including experiences across our county and province and internationally.

This site is for anyone interested in community economic development, community organizing, asset-based community development, rural development, international development, local and regional politics and so forth. My goal is to provide you with a framework with which to envision your own part in the development of your own community, however you may define that. I do not at all pretend to have all the answers and indeed, you may follow along and be left with more questions than when you arrived here.

In my possession are pages upon pages of notes, letters, emails, and other tidbits that I have amassed over the last twenty-five years or more and this site will be a repository for many of them as I begin to organize and edit and augment the ones I hope you will find most useful.  My hope is to put them into some sort of coherent order to illustrate my own journey in the world of community development, from my upbringing as a child watching my parents volunteer, becoming involved with and then leading a number of organizations, to running in a federal election, and ultimately stepping away from any involvement whatsoever, whether from burnout and frustration or simply a lack of time, and finally being able to reflect on my beliefs about what community development is.

I begin this now without the concrete answer of what community development is or what it means. In fact one of the last times I was working independently on a major project I had a discussion with some development professionals about how the term itself was outdated and we needed a new term to describe what was happening today. I proffered my terms for a project under the heading Community Enhancement as a way of distinguishing myself from the pack. I was offered the job but declined in the end because by the time the tendering process was completed I had accepted another position with a large company that paid a lot more money and didn’t come with an end date (at least not one I knew about).

Therein lies of on the major facts of community development work that will play a major theme along this new road I am heading down today: in the vast majority of cases, if a job exists at all for someone with experience, community development work doesn’t pay big money. So is this type of work simply for the altruistic people of this world? Or perhaps it’s just for people who are chronically unemployed and liberal-minded?

All of this has been weighing on me for the last few years but very recently a good friend sent me some information for a job posting in the field of community development saying it was “right up my alley” and you know what? In many ways it was, but two things, I was not (and am not) looking for a new job, and also, if I were, this one paid less than half my current salary. I’d go bankrupt if I took that job!

Something that keeps nagging at me is whether community groups can really make a difference or does real community development come from individuals who have succeeded on their own and simply contribute to the success of the community by virtue of their individual success. What I am trying to get at is this – think about the lifelong, chronically underemployed volunteer with a community development association who has toiled and sweat through the trenches of board meetings and public forums and fundraising and grant writing and who usually ends up paying out of their own pocket to attend some big community development conference because their organization can’t afford it… and they go there to listen and to learn about all the great things happening elsewhere and the hope is to take those new ideas and methodologies back home and employ them in a meaningful way to create something – anything – that will lead to growth or positive change or progress (however you prefer to term it). What happens if an idea works and leads to some new jobs? Does this person get one? What happens to the organization if the person is now employed full time and doesn’t have time to volunteer like they used to? Is that why the person was involved all along? Is there an ethical dilemma here?

Now go back to the big conference with all the great ideas. Where do they come from? Is it really volunteers in non-profit organizations that are making the difference and spurring economic growth? Or individuals who run their own businesses?

I admit there are great examples on both sides, but my hypothesis is that the truth lies heavily on the idea that meaningful, long-lasting, positive, community economic development comes from individuals who have an idea and run with it unencumbered by the micro-bureaucracy of local community development groups.

I’ve been to a week-long gathering where one of the main themes was deep democracy and working through a problem until you reach complete consensus is certainly admirable, but I’ve also seen perfectly sensible ideas drawn and quartered on the floor of a public meeting because of the objections of an irrational few.

My hope would be to disprove this hypothesis and say that community development organizations really do make a difference, but as you will see, direct from my own experience, in my own hometown, our local community development organization has been an epic failure.

Full disclosure: I was a board member of the Judique & Area Development Association from its re-birth in 2002 right up until about 2014 when it went defunct. A part of this process is to analyze my own personal journey, bringing you along with me, to detect whether the failure of this group was perhaps my very own fault.

I’ve been that chronically underemployed, idealistic, motivated and optimistic, pusher of communally-philosophic methodology and practices, and I’ve cursed and sworn under my breath at the lack of support and opposition to my ideas, and cried myself to sleep too many times to count as I dreamed of making my community a better place for all. But then once I had an offer for a great job in an unrelated field, I jumped at it and for the most part, didn’t look back. So was I trying to make the world a better place for all? Or just for myself?

Again, I don’t know all the answers yet. That’s what this is about. I hope you’ll join me.

This is the beginning.

The end will be a completed volume on the subject, somewhat edited perhaps from what you may find on this blog, but certainly this project is a means to putting that volume of work together in a reasonable and logical fashion.

-Dwayne MacEachern