In this blog I would like to talk about how meshing life experience with volunteering in an alternative community has changed my life and can be applied to create a sense community.
In September of 2005 I had been working at a drug store as a pharmacy tech for 3 and a half years when I decided enough was enough and I needed a change. I decided to go on a trip to South East Asia mainly for a breath of fresh air and to experience different cultures. I quickly put down $500 on a $1300 open ended ticket leaving in January to Bangkok, Thailand. While working to get out of the lease at my apartment, I had been volunteering at a local community organic garden with my girlfriend at the time. I had found it surprisingly calming to bike down to the garden, often going just so I could pull weeds and think of where my trip would take me. I had a common guide book (lonely planet) and would pull weeds and then sit and talk with the groundskeeper about cool places to visit and all the kinds of trouble a young 20's kid from Ontario would get up to.
Slowly we prepped the garden for the next years planting, over the coming months as winter hit us hard in November covering so much work with a solid foot of snow but the major fall cleaning had paid off and we found ourselves content at the final garden meeting.
The experience gained from volunteering there was great but to this point I had felt little connection with the community. This was mainly because our operation was small and although recognized by the city, the garden produced only enough for a local food shelter as well as what we took home ourselves.
December rolled in and I felt that travelling itch which came with the anticipation of leaving for a different life. By the time my birthday hit (21 December) I had a wealth of knowledge about what I wanted to do yet as always friends and family gave me even more resources for my birthday. As Christmas rolled around I was squirming in my seat at the thought of jumping on a plane and then it happened.
On boxing day in 2005 a Tsunami hit South East Asia hard killing over 400,000 people and rendering most western coastlines unidentifiable. This was a huge shock to me with my pending trip. I decided (much to my family's shagrin) that it would not stop me and I would still be going regardless of what had happened. I found a weird comfort in the fact that anything that may happen on my trip would surely not compare to the current situation.
I arrived in Bangkok in late January to a hot steamy tarmac that gave visions of barbecuing in the back yard as heat waves made the surrounding trees look like they were underwater floating with the current. After a short stay in Bangkok planning my next move I headed north to Chaing Mai where I found a beautiful city where I could slowly immerse myself in the Thai culture. After meeting other travellers, locals, and ex-pats I found my self thinking about how this inland area had no effects of tsunami and did not reflect the destruction all over the news back home. I met an English guy from Cornwall, who was a big fan of diving and he told me about he was headed south to the Andaman coast where the tsunami struck hardest. I decided I would go with him and see what had happened.
Although the prospect of volunteering had crossed my mind I was not yet ready to comprehend what it would be like down there. Away we headed to Ko Phi Phi a little island off of the coast of the major southern Thai city Phuket. An 8 hour bus ride, a 12 hour train ride, and a 2 hour ferry later I was on Phi Phi.
As we pulled into the dock evidence of the destruction was everywhere. From boats crushed on rocks to tens of trees folded over as if they were elastic. The island had a well established volunteer organization working with locals, police, and a variety of other organizations to help clean up the reef, the land, and of course the remains of people that had perished in the natural disaster. Without even a thought or hesitation I found myself signing up and committing to staying on the island for an extended period of time while I volunteered my services.
Its funny how you spend all this time thinking about what something might be like but when you arrive, an inherent human nature takes over and you commit without any deliberation. The first type of recovery I did was dive recovery for refuse on the interior reef. This was surprisingly fun the first day as I had met a bunch of keen people from across the globe with a similar mentality to help or do whatever they could. The first day we found parts of houses, stores, bikes and miscellaneous goods from the beach huts that had washed into the sea. That day I wondered how this community made up of several different races and backgrounds was so different from the volunteering I had done back home.
The next day made an impact on my life that would stay with me for the rest of my life. While diving about 100 feet off the beach and only about 5 meters deep in the water with three other guys we came upon a corrugated steel roof (most likely from a beach shack). As we tied off the roof and raised our bubble bags to the surface where monitoring snorkelers waited to pull up the roof we stepped back from the large piece of steel and waited. As the steel roof slowly lifted off the ocean floor creating a haze of silt that blurred my vision, I struggled to make sense of the view and then focus came back as a human hand slowly floated in front of my mask. The moments that passed became even more vivid as the bright red hair of a 35 year old western woman mimicked the movement of a jelly fish in the water. To this day I still have crazy realistic nightmares about this experience where she comes alive and keeps me down in the water.
As we surfaced her body the smell reached the surface and oxidized which caused all four of us to be sick in the water. She was later identified by a forensic scientist that visited the island weekly and her family obtained closure on her missing status.
Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with community, right? Well I can tell you that this made me take my life more seriously and that I realized that the community I was a part of came out of a necessity and not as hobby. Often community initiatives are the product of people wanting something and then coming together to obtain it. In this sense I found that we were rebuilding a community that in most cases we had no idea what it previously looked like. Sure the beach remained the same but the people and the lives of those effected was forever changed. Helping them rebuild their lives made me realize that the community garden back home did mean something because had I viewed it in the sense that if a tsunami had hit the garden, all traces that we had been there putting in our efforts would be gone. This realization allowed me to view even the most minuscule grass roots movement as important in any community.
Although it took a natural disaster to bring so many people together I am forever grateful for the experience and truly believe that every little bit counts. When we come together to overcome big issues we can reflect on our previous decisions and make steps to better ourselves as we move forward. When this ideology is enforced at a community level the possibilities are endless.
Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to bring a community together in a way that defys all logic.
This blog is from my own experience over seas and strikes a more personal tone but I feel it is relevant and may bring light to any posts that may not make sense to the reader.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment