We had overnight guests this weekend. When I read the welcome note Carolyn left in their room, I discovered that she used a handmade card we had bought in the Philippines when we lived there more than 20 years ago.
The card brought back a flood of memories. The homemade cards were often made by political detainees, who needed to earn money to pay for food and medicine while in prison. Sometimes they were made by organized groups in the slums, who sold them to earn money for their daily essentials.
I used to experience an overwhelming sense of the futility of using handmade cards to support a family – even while we were buying the cards! Making a card for .05 cents just didn’t seem like a way to work one’s way out of poverty! It didn’t seem as though it could lay the foundation for social change.
What I realized this weekend is how similar Elkhart County Works Together is to the cardmakers in the Philippines! Planting a garden isn’t going to support a family. Listing your name in the (soon to be unveiled) Skills Bank won’t generate the money a job in the RV factory used to. Making a small financial contribution won’t put thousands of people back to work. These activities can seem merely symbolic rather than likely to make a real change in peoples’ lives.
The economic problems facing Elkhart County can seem overwhelming. In truth, there is nothing that any single person can do to solve our problems.
Yet I believe that if every one of us did something for those among us who need help, we would be able to come through this crisis as a unified and strengthened community.
Perhaps the lesson I absorbed in the Philippines, without even knowing it, is the value of doing something rather than doing nothing.
What can you do to help Elkhart County work together?
Kurtz farm to clean up piles of brush and wood, and weed flower beds grown over since the farm was idled several years ago. After working, and sweating, for several hours, they gathered for food and conversation.
Building community is not about a one-to-one correlation between giving and receiving. It is not about contributing in the expectation of getting back.
