Intentional Community's 18 days by Daniel

This year on the Intentional Communities 18 day trip we visited several different communities. One highlight of the trip was visiting 'Move' in Philadelphia. We went on a walk to a swimming hole that had a rope swing and passed out pamphlets. Another highlight was visiting the Ganas community on Staten island. One day that we were on the island the trip split in half. Some of us went to New York city and walked around and ate pizza and French fries. The other half of our field trip went to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Then we met up and went to Lombardi's Pizzeria. Also we went to Pete's friend's house and farm in Charlottesville, Virginia and helped him rebuild his chicken tractors. He treated us to broiled chicken and salad. Over all, it was a great trip. - Daniel

Pictures

Here are some pictures from the trip:

A Goose in the Chicken Hut...

Well, we are in the final days of our trip and still going strong. After leaving Philly, we went to New York to stay with GANAS on Staten Island. Iris, Delphi, and Gavin helped cook one of the evening meals while the rest of the group took a ride on the ferry into Manhattan. The next day the group split up with half of it going into the city to explore and the rest going to the Liberty Science Museum. We all got back together that night for Pizza at Lombardi's.

Yesterday, we drove down to Virginia and spent the night at the Tandem Friends School. Today, we went to Joel Slezak's farm and helped him put up some electric fencing, rebuild some chicken tractors, and gut a goose that Joel had hunted that morning. For lunch, Joel rewarded us with two delicious chickens right from his farm. It tasted amazing.

Tomorrow we are visiting with the Tandem Friends School and then going to Yogaville. We will be spending our final night in Farmville, VA before heading home to AMS on Thursday.

See you all then.

MOVE...............

March 12
Yesterday was busy day. We went to hang out with MOVE, an inner city community in Philadelphia. We went to a park in Philadelphia where we did some muscle building exercises with them. Then, we went on a walk to a river where Delphi, Iris, Nick, Gavin, and Daniel all went swimming and jumped off a rope swing. It was cold. That afternoon, we handed out pamphlets about a play MOVE was putting on in April. After an exhausting day, we went to get Philly cheese steaks at Tony Luke's an watched a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof.

The trip so far has been one thing after another so today we took a day off. We spent the day watching movies and playing boardgames. We are well rested and ready for our trip to New York tomorrow.

Felix

We Reached the Halfway Mark

Hey here's the latest update on the events of our trip.

March, 2
Today we visited Jubilee Partners. We ate lunch with them and took a tour of their wonderful and expansive organic gardens. After lunch, we went to the school and played games with some of the younger refugees from Burma.

March, 4
We went to Greensboro, NC today and helped some Amish put down the sub flooring to their new house. We also walked around the beautiful country side and went into a quaint Amish country store.

March, 6
We traveled on to Lancaster, PA to visit another Amish family. Bob Neuhauser brought us on a tour of the countryside and an Amish family's huge farm. They showed us their home and all of their animals. They also answered the many questions we had for them about their way of life.

March, 8
Today, we went to Fort Meade near Washington D.C. They gave us a tour and then we ate lunch in the cafeteria. We talked with the soldiers during lunch and asked them questions about what it was like to live on the base. Then we returned to Harry and Emily Volz's house where we are staying. They made us a delicious dinner and dessert.

March, 9
Still in D.C., we woke up early and took a tour of the White House and met up with the Power Trip for a little while. After that, we wandered around the city and some of us went to the Holocaust Museum.

March,10
Today, we traveled to Philly and did service work for the South Jersey Food Bank by packing lunches for their Kids Packs program. We packed over 340 lunches. Tonight, we will be staying with the Murray family in Collingswood, NJ and enjoying a wonderful dinner of fish tacos.

Till next time...
Delphi

Frisbee, Beef Stew, and Warm Weather

Hola Followers,

First off we want to wish a Happy Birthday to Pete and Lauren who both turned 25!

We're on the road! We left this morning at about 10:30 after the usual chaos of last minute packing and preparation. We had a slight change in our schedule due to snow. Our stop in West Virgina, where we were going to stay with Chris and Torula, unfortunately had to be canceled because they received three feet of snow and everyone agreed it would be potentially problematic for us to try and get up there. So instead, this morning we made some last minute phone calls and are now staying in Greensboro where we will visit an Amish group and stay with some friends of Pete's.

Today, we had a four and a half hour drive south to Comer Baptist Church Youth Center. The weather was a pleasant 65 degrees this afternoon and we enjoyed it by walking to a nearby park and playing Ultimate Frisbee. Then we ate a wonderful dinner provided by Brenna and Gaea Goldberg, an AMS alum and her mom. Tonight we will taking it easy before going on a tour at Jubilee Partners tomorrow!

Until I write again yours truly,
Iris Rountree

Trip Itinerary

Jubilee Partners
Our first stop, Jubilee Partners, is a well established Christian Community located in north Georgia. They take in refugees and adapt them to U.S. culture.

Greensboro, NC
We then go to Greensboro, NC where we will be staying at the Friendship Friends Meeting. Details are still being worked out for what type of service work we will be doing due to the last minute change in plans (Thank you incessant snow!), but it will either be with the Anarchists or the Amish. We'll let you know.

Amish
Then we drive to Lancaster County, PA where we will visit the Amish and stay at a Friends Meeting. While we are there we will go to an Amish Mud Sale and then a buggy ride through the country side.

Washington DC
We will go to the Holocaust Museum and hopefully meet up with the Power Trip for a tour of the White House.

Philadelphia
We will then visit MOVE, an African American community formed by former Black Panthers. We will do service work on their urban farm.

New York
We will stay Ganas an international community on Staten Island. We will visit some ethnic neighborhoods and hopefully do service work at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen.

Charlottesville, VA
We will visit Yogaville, a Buddhist intentional community, and Twin Oaks Community. We will do service work for Joel Slezak's farm and stay at the Tandom Friends School.

Home!

Same culture, new perspective

For our next big assignment, I wanted the students to take a step back from their own world and look at mainstream American culture from the perspective of an outsider. We spent a few days thinking about issues related to cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, and learning what it means to do ethnography using the anthropological method of participant observation.
We were ready to go out into the field! Our fieldwork site: Walmart.

The students were given the following assignment:
You are from Jupiter. You have never been to Earth before, and you were sent by your government to find out about human life. Your government is very curious about humans in the US in particular, because they have determined the US to be a dominant player in Earth politics. Your government wants you to gather data about how typical Americans live. They want as much information as you can provide about what Americans eat and drink, wear, and entertain themselves with. They also want to know how Americans think and behave, what they believe in, and how they communicate.

Excerpts from student essays:
Upon entering [Walmart], one immediately notices that there are cages upon cages with metal grills constructing it, and no cover for the top. Presumably, people use them to put their offspring in if they are runts, misbehaving, or are weak or ill. I notice that some human children are indeed wailing as they are stuck inside the cage...
The rows and rows of towering, and short, columns of Walmart are lined with an enormous array of puzzling, confounding and seemingly purposeless items. To try to get a better understanding of what these things might be, I opted to follow a person entering Walmart, and follow them through out their visit.
The human I chose to follow was a female in her later years. She had no offspring but she took a cage anyway. At first she took her cage and started off purposefully, her cage rattling noisily in front of her. Presentely, after much glowering at people who were going along the same row as she (which made me wonder if the right direction to travel through Walmart was her way), she arrived at a row with shelves that were lineds with boxes that were made of a highly flammable material, something I learned when I touched a box, and the heat from my finger burn a hole through the box.
- Taro Ohta-Weir, 9th grade

In one of the sections [of Walmart] that I was most drawn to there were lots of tiny bottles and tubes of colored stuff. When I opened one of the bottles and smelled it, it had no smell, when I touched it, it left a small print of red on my finger. When I tasted it, it didn't taste like much but it wasn't good. Maybe they use it for war paint, or writing, or maybe it is a healing stick. Of the many rows that were filled with this stuff, I was confused that they had so much of the same things. And all of them seemed to be basically the same color.
Above the tubes and bottles that were pictures of what seemed to slightly resemble humans, but no one that I saw in Walmart looked like the people in those pictures. In fact, every picture in the store in all the sections looked the same way. They had smooth skin and white teeth. In the section with the colored sticks some of the smoothed skin people had bright colored lips and dark lines around their eyes and on eye hairs. A couple even had bright blue shimmering color behind their eyes like scales. Maybe this was what the humans used to look like or what they will look like, but I didn't like these smoothed skin people at all. Of the many bottles and tubes of colored sticks and liquids even some of the humans did not know whjat it was. The aged old wise woman was confused whereas a younger woman seemed to understand everything and had no trouble figuring out exactly where what she wanted was.
- Iris Rountree, 9th grade

There was a particular section that caught my eye, there were many different shapes that were hard and clear a substance which I had never seen before, and inside some of them were different colored powders, some of them even had a liquid skin inside them it was the same color as the humans. When I asked one of them what it was they replied that they did not know and that they would "call customer service." Not knowing what that was I left in search of more uself data.
- Delphi Fishbach-Waters, 8th Grade

Student responses to culture-creating activity

After the students debated the best courses of action in our culture-creating activity, I asked them to respond in writing to a series of questions about the issues that came up. Each student was required to find a connection between a difficult decision the group had to make during the activity and a real world issue that is or has been debated in the US.

Some examples of the connections students made:

I thought that the most interesting thing while we were on the island that compared to the US was the system pf punishment. As a single man, I was killed. However, the expecting couple of which the man used to be the leader was spared, to almost being accepted back into the group. This compares to how in the US racial/cultural status plays a large role in figuring out sentences.
For example, until recently, the sentence on crack was longer than that of cocaine. Even though they are essentially the same drug, African Americans more commonly use crack, while richer, upper class white people did cocaine. This shows that a lot going into one's punishment is one's race, and social status, and even though the type of crime committed does have some say, it may not be the most primary reason.
- Gavin Maddock, 7th grade, who played the professor who was killed by the group

You're stranded on a deserted island...

Now that we had explored some of the ways that existing cultures meet human needs, it was time for the students to create their own culture.

I gave the students the following scenario:
You have been ship-wrecked on a deserted tropical island. You were caught in a storm and blown off your charted course by hundreds of miles. You are the only survivors, and nearly all the remnants of the ship washed out to sea. You have enough fresh water to last 6-7 days and enough canned food for 4-5 days. You will need to create shelters, and look for sources of food and fresh water. You have a few knives and 1 flashlight.

Some students were given assigned characters, including a pregnant woman with a very protective husband who is also a skilled carpenter, a professor who believes strongly in consensus decision-making, an ex-Navy seal, and a feminist college student.

I then provided them with specific tasks and challenges that they had to work through as a group:
Challenge 1: Figure out how to organize yourselves to build shelters and find food.
Solution 1: After much arguing, the students decided to choose a leader to assign tasks.

Challenge 2: The professor panicked in the night and ate all the remaining food supplies. Decide if and how you will punish him.
Solution 2: The group came to the decision to kill the professor very quickly, but spent a long time deciding the method and how to make his death profitable to the group. Ultimately, they chose to cut off his hands and genitals and send him into the jungle to serve as bait for wild animals.

Challenge 3: The married couple have taken all potential weapons and are standing guard over the only source of fresh water on the island. They will only give the rest of the group water if they bring gifts of food.
Solution 3: Bring gifts of food to start out because the group needs water to live, but plot a rebellion and take over the water supply by force at the first opportunity.

Challenge 4: Now that you have successfully overthrown the water dictators and they are tied up, what will you do with them? Consider the precedent you set by killing the professor, the fact that you will have to provide food and water to the prisoners if you decide to keep them alive, and that the prisoners won't be able to do any work to support the group without risking their escape.
Solution 4: The students were very hesitant to kill a pregnant woman, and also to lose the valuable carpentry skills of her husband. However, they realized that they would have to work to provide food and water to them and get nothing in return as long as the couple were held prisoner. They decided to negotiate with the couple and let them go.

Challenge 5: One member of the group becomes very ill with a rash and fever and dies. How do you deal with her death, both in terms of her potentially contagious body and possessions, and to give her a respectful farewell?
Solution 5: Burn down her hut, with her body still inside it. The students felt this would address both issues because no one would have to touch her body or belongings, and the fire would be an appropriate time to say goodbye.

At first the students were hesitant to get into character and take their predicament seriously, but by the time we had to stop they were arguing heatedly and disappointed I didn't have more challenges for them.

We finished with a discussion of what had happened and related some of the challenges and their solutions to debates going on in the US right now.

Coming soon! Student reflections on this activity and thoughts about how the problems they faced in their mini culture mirror US society.

Meeting basic needs can be very complex

To kick off our class about alternative living in the US, we asked ourselves what it takes for a human being anywhere in the world to live. We came up with a class list of universal, basic human needs.

Student list of basic human needs:

• Food/water/oxygen
  
• Shelter/clothing
  
• Sex/reproduction
• Tools/technology - knives, hammers, means of transportation etc.
  
• Communication - language, art, music, dance
  
• Entertainment - games, music, art, dance, etc.
• Explanation of unknown - religion, science, mythology
  

We then compared how Native American tribes that lived in North Carolina (including the Pisgah that inhabited the Blue Ridge mountains where AMS is located) met our list of human needs with the ways these needs are met in the US today. The students each came up with their own list of how basic needs are met by most Americans.

Through making these comparisons, it became clear that people often create very complex systems and structures in order to meet their basic needs. We discussed municipal water systems and sewage treatment, ceremonial buildings that get torn down and rebuilt over and over, industrial agriculture and supermarkets, computer games and games using only reeds, and the various ways that religions, mythologies, and science explain the unknown in our world. There are many ways to meet our needs, and the diverse systems people around the world have found to do so are what make cultures unique.