7. Community Skills and Discussions
Information on In the Wake:
From the practical Q&A series
see:
Q&A #3: Security issues
Read about the Amish and
rapid community-based disaster relief and additional
reader comments on that.
Related posts from the blog:
Monday, March 13, 2006
The Common Ground
Collective is doing totally amazing work in New Orleans based
on solidarity and mutual aid rather than a charity model. And
there is a great article about them in Mother Jones (via Ran
Prieur) called The
Street Samaritans:
Then one morning four days into the storm,
something happened that melted the fear and eased the tension.
Four young people on bicycles showed up in Algiers, knocking on
doors and asking if anyone needed medical attention. Asked if
they were from the Red Cross or the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, neither of which had yet made an appearance in Algiers,
the medics said no, they were just volunteers who had come without
authorization. They offered first aid, took blood pressure, tested
for diabetes, and inquired about symptoms of anxiety, depression
and disease. “It was just about the noblest thing I’ve
ever witnessed in my life,” recalls Malik Rahim, a lifelong
Algiers resident, local housing activist and former Black Panther
Party member who helped arrange space for the medical workers
in a local mosque. ”It was the street medics who really
stopped this city from exploding into a race war, because they
were white and were serving the black community at a time when
blacks were fed up. Those are the real heroes of this thing.”
Rahim, a friendly, outgoing man whose graying
dreadlocks and soft voice belie his radical past, is now the symbolic
leader of the Common Ground Collective, an unlikely tribe of activists
and health care practitioners who have descended on New Orleans
to provide “solidarity, not charity” to the people
of this devastated community. The “street medics”
on their bikes--part of a loose national network of nurses and
medical assistants who provide first aid to protesters at antiwar
demonstrations—were among the first to respond. “The
whole place smelled like death,” recalls Noah Morris, a
wiry anti-corporate activist from St. Louis who recalls seeing
four gunshot victims, their bodies crudely covered by sheets of
corrugated tin. Most of his initial patients, Noah says, suffered
from high blood pressure, which he treated with herbal remedies
and nutritional supplements “to help get the pressure down
just a little bit.” The medics were followed a few days
later by a caravan of doctors, nurses and grief counselors from
San Francisco. Then, as word of the clinic spread, scores of health
practitioners and political activists from all over the country
began making their way to New Orleans.
If a better society comes out of collapse it will be (at least
in part) because people are doing work like this.
Subjects to add, discuss or address:
Suggestions welcome.
Communities and community building
Consensus and decision-making
Group-building activities
Signs of healthy communities
Bricollage and improvisational exercises
Avoiding coercive hierarchy and power centralization
People with disAbilities and chronic illnesses and the end of
civilization
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