Some reflections on being in community

by Christine Carolan

The East Timorese kids stood in a semicircle on the stage, holding candles, symbols of their hope for their relatives facing militia violence in East Timor. No teacher prowled the aisles of the crowded school auditorium; it just wasn’t necessary. The silence was palpable. The disparate crowd in the Collingwood College auditorium on that day in October 1999 –students, past students, visitors, parents and teachers – became one in their concern. Long time Australians and more recent Australians, some who were refugees themselves from Ethiopia and Vietnam, the Balkans and China, found themselves in that one short hour welded into a community of concern. And the beneficiaries were not only the East Timorese young people who felt supported. Every person who participated in that assembly came away the richer for the experience. They had been a school community before that assembly but through the process of the assembly their one-ness was celebrated.

I live next door to a friend from my uni days 30 years ago; we’re across the park from another friend and around the corner from another. There have been as many as 7 households of friends who have bought or rented houses in our neighbourhood. The benefits are considerable. We can borrow a cup of flour; we can share camping equipment; we can eat together; we can look out for someone who is sick or sad. We can water each other gardens during holiday time. Our kids feel loved and watched over by a crowd of aunts and uncles. The friendship between our households makes it easier to be neighbourly with a lot of other local households. I feel a part of a strong local community.

In the mid 80s I became an International Teaching Fellow, teaching in upstate New York for a year. At the school I learnt about emergency procedures for students and staff should we be involved in a nuclear explosion. Some miles from the school, in a picturesque rural landscape of cornfields and dairy barns, there was an underground silo for storing nuclear weapons. This silo made our area a nuclear target zone.

I visited the nearby Syracuse Peace Council, a group of activists with a shopfront and the task of representing the range of social justice issues concerning the women’s movement, gay rights, the environmental movement, East Timor and nuclear disarmament. I heard from this group that there was to be a women’s peace march to the underground nuclear silos to protest their existence. I asked around my teaching and residential communities for a group to go with to the peace march. I drew a total blank. Peace marches had not been part of the scene in our rural area. And a few of my teaching colleagues explained to me that their jobs would be at risk if they took part.

So one evening in late summer I drove down by myself to the rallying point for the peace march. Hundreds of women were gathering in the twilight. We were briefed on non-violence, on the route of the march, on the decision some had taken to be arrested.

I knew no one. In the dark it was difficult to actually meet other women. So I just joined the line as we set off into the balmy evening, singing and lighting our way with candles. We knew what we were about. We were standing up to the lunacy of nuclear war. We, as women, were strong. I was a foreigner; I knew no-one and yet I knew I belonged in that community of women marching the backroads of rural New York that warm summer evening.

Three experiences of community – in my kids’ school, in my local neighbourhood, and in rural New York. How do these three pictures interact?

They show me that community is at one point an accidental grouping of individuals. But the strength of a community, and its potential to move mountains, can be built on and built on, by events like the Collingwood College assembly, or the women’s peace march, or by a simple neighbourhood picnic.

They show me that community is good for individuals because community is greater than the sum total of its parts.