more authentic community

"This is how my parents' community works. They don't have endless meetings and minutes. When there is a birth, the aunties know immediately. When someone dies, it doesn't take long for the food rotation to be set up. It is from my parents that I learned my first lesson of community organizing: You must first have a community, one that you share joy with as well as suffering. My parents had a certain amount of respect and trust among their friends. It hit me that being trustworthy was essential to being involved in community work, and being worthy of this trust took a lifetime. My parents knew they could call on people because they knew the community could call on them."

This sounds like Acts 2 in real life. But it isn't. It's a Pakistani woman's lesson learned from watching her parents and their friends after the earthquake that shook northern Pakistan in October 2005. The author and her parents live in the US, but her mother is originally from a village that was devastated by the earthquake. (It's taken from the essay "If This Were My Family: Relearning Important Lessons of Organizing After the Earthquake" by Bushra Rehman, published in Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith, & Sexuality, edited by Sarah Husain.)

The whole story is gripping, to me at least. As soon as they heard of the quake, they were on the phone, learning of the devastation, organizing their network of connections to send food, water, clothing and other supplies to friends and relatives 2 days faster than the government sent any assistance. Wow. The author's parents even went themselves, and lived alongside friends and family in makeshift tents, in northern Pakistan. This was their community, and they wanted to make a difference. In fact, they felt they had no option but to get involved. Where is this drive in my own life?

"While watching my parents, I couldn't believe that all these years I saw them as old-fashioned and myself as the radical one. Watching them in action, I relearned teh most important lessons of activism: The strongest, most effective form of community activism is not complicated. It comes from a sense of family, love, urgency. It's not something that can be taught in a college classroom or learned from a book. It comes from a sincere belief that we are in this world together and must take care of each other, as well as ourselves. How different my own activism would be if every time something happened, I asked myself, 'What would I do if this were my family?'"