Community

Our tree started as a cutting picked up
from the verge. It was a Christmas tree
that stayed and became a seasonal tree.
Here it is both Easter tree and
remembrance tree. 

After writing about being single and finding a work partnership, the natural next topic for me is community. For many years community has been a high value for me. Along the way of looking at how I can share life with those around me, I came up with five [s]s, to which I’ve added an ‘h’, so I’ll start with those;

Simplicity [sɪmˈplɪsəti]

To practice gratitude and contentment and a recognition of ‘enough’ rather than giving in to the cultural demand for ‘more’…bigger, better, newer, shinier, sexier…but always more. Sometimes it is about getting back to basics, which can be more effort than instant, but is simple in its own way.

The tree in mourning between
Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Solidarity [sɒlɪˈdæɹəti]

To remember our brothers and sisters both in other places and nearby and to live accordingly. Sometimes this will mean small sacrifices, other times significant protests or changes. To seek to understand the ‘other’ and how they experience life, then to respond to that in love. Who would I want them to be or do if our places were reversed?

Spirituality [spɪɹɪtjuæləti]

To make the time to share, explore and deepen our spiritual life. I live this as a Christian, but expect communities of other faiths could also hold the same value. I’ve found that shared spiritual practices takes discipline and commitment, but that it is worth it. Shared prayer, shared Scripture, shared quiet, shared fears, shared joys…these are all pieces of a communal spiritual life.

Sustainability includes the vegie patch

Sustainability [sɑˈstæɪnəˌbɪliəti]

To live in a way that does not destroy God’s creation or burn ourselves out. For me this is about being community to those I cannot see and will never meet, by caring for the world in a way that allows them to live in it too. It extends my sense of community beyond people to nature.

Celebrate life [ˈsɛləbɹæɪt ˌlaɪf]

Don’t take all this too seriously, but enjoy the life we’ve been given. Create! Celebrate! Don’t wear yourself down with having to ‘do’ but spend time to ‘be’.

The tree of thankfulness,
decorated with tins that hold
candles and cards that
express thanks, which were
written as part of a
celebratory meal.

Hospitality [hɒspɪˈtæləti]

Welcoming others, sharing food and drink, making home a warm place, not a fortress, yet still having it be a sanctuary when need be. Having visitors, be they family or travellers, to stay for a day or a week.

These things all overlap and I am constantly rediscovering and redefining them.  Through childhood, travel, house-shares, sailing, villages, intentional communities and communities-by-necessity, I’ve experienced the blessings and challenges of community. Although these elements of community bring together the way I wish to live, I regularly fail. Still, it is a journey worth continuing.

Partnership

Some of the singles having a night of Indian food and dress ups

The mass of single women in this organisation each find their own way to manage alone in a foreign place. At Ukarumpa it is easier, as you can choose to share a house or to have one to yourself. You can choose to join in group events or to spend quiet evenings at home. Your work as part of a department and together you form a team. You end up being adopted into families so that you are not alone.

For those of us who are translators working in villages the challenges are different. Although we enjoy the support of Ukarumpa between village visits, our work situation is very different. It is distant, intense and isolated. Some choose to work as the only expat in a language project, most try to find another single woman to form a work partnership with. Some establish a partnership, then end up working alone as health, life and home situations…and sometimes marriage… cause the other woman to leave the project.

Traditionally, translators assigned to one language for life, working twenty years in a single place. The partnerships these women formed were intense, forged through decades of trials. How translation happens has been changing and so have work partnerships. Increasingly, languages are brought together in cluster projects and nationals given the training to carry the bulk of the translation work. Ex-pats have taken on more of an advisor role and although they ideally still ‘anchor’ in a single language community, they spend less time there in the long term than the ‘classic’ teams. This takes a lot of the pressure off their partnership.

Talking about partnership is hard. In a world where marriage is being redefined, people easily make wrong assumptions. The partnership I am talking about is a work relationship plus a friendship. Sure, it often becomes a very close friendship, but it is not a relationship in the marriage sense.

Working out who to partner with is hard. Firstly I have had to get my head around the fact that it is not as intense as it used to be. I can partner with someone for a term (2-4 years) and then review afterwards if the relationship still works and where the language programme is at. Previously, village teams were very isolated, with HF radio their only outside contact. Now, teams can get email via HF radio and mobile coverage is swiftly spreading across the country, bringing internet access with it.

Still, even with the pressure taken off, I want to partner with someone I can both work well with and be friends with. Maybe it is not as full on as previously, but working together in a team can still be an intense and isolated situation which you want to enter into with someone you trust. All my years of house sharing on land and cabin sharing at sea have given me a skill set to live with people I don’t necessarily consider myself close to, as well as the skills to quickly assess who I will enjoy living and working with, as well as who I’ll be happy to farewell.

These skills, along with discussion with friends and plenty of prayer see me on the path to establishing a work partnership, but it is something that still needs field testing before we allocate to a project. This testing will probably be in the form of pre-allocation trips and workshops in places we are looking at for the lone term. As I narrow down the partner-list to a likely option, the allocation list is wide open and I find myself yet again looking at the future and having to decide which one of many good paths to walk. 

Wanpis

Being single is a-cultural.

When I travelled in Italy, I was forever being asked if I was ‘da solo’ (alone) and where my ragazzo (boyfriend) was. That I was single and content to travel alone seemed hard for people to accept.

When I was in India, people did not see me as alone, as I was with my sister and her partner. People would stop us in the street to express their delight at seeing sisters together (Meanwhile, some of our ‘Western’ friends would ask us how we knew each other…).

In Australia I constantly find myself fighting assumptions that come with being single. One assumption is that I must be sleeping with someone, as some people cannot comprehend voluntary celibacy. Another assumption is that if I am not sleeping with someone, I must be a-sexual. No, I am definitely attracted to men, but I have chosen to follow a particular path and practice the self control to do so. Other times the assumption is that I must be a closet lesbian. Once again, No. My ‘lifestyle choice’ is to be celibate unless I enter into a lifelong monogamous relationship with a man.

Another assumption is that marriage is the be all and end all of life satisfaction, even though most married couples would dispute that. This assumption comes out in phrases such as ‘on the shelf’ or ‘spinster’ versus being ‘settled’. When a friend was unexpectedly pregnant, many people commented on how good it was to see her ‘settled at last’. As much as she loves her child, I doubt she saw it that way at the time, and she is still making plans to wander the world, but now they are family sized plans.

Here in PNG the assumptions are different. I am ‘wan pis’* and in villages get asked if I spend my life ‘sindaun nating’* I then go into a lengthy discussion of how not being married means I have to do everything as I do not share the work with someone else. I also try to explain that if I were married with children, it would be very difficult to do the work I do, such as being with them in the village running workshops. What helps me is that in every region there are some long standing single translator women who are known and respected. More often than not, the conversation finishes with ‘…like Robin/Karan/Tuula’. I am happy to be compared with women I admire and respect!

The four single women on my orientation course.

I am surrounded by amazing single women**, both nationals and ex-pats, who put their all into life. They are not sitting on the sidelines waiting for Prince Charming to sweep them off their feet…although most (myself included) wouldn’t object if that happened! They are not missing out, but filling life with good things. Sure, life would be good in different ways if they were married, but they focus on what they do have instead. They do not hate children, but are usually ‘Auntie’ to at least one other family who lives and works here.

Yes, being single has its hard days, when I wish there was someone with whom I could share life for the long term. I form many wonderful friendships, but live with the fact that my friends will move away and change as we each go our different ways. It can be hard to keep making more friends who you know will leave, but the pain of loss is preferable to that of loneliness.

Being single also has its wonderful days, when it means I am free to go to regions to work. If I had a husband or family, so much would have to change in what I did and how. Not a bad thing, just very different. Being single means I can invest myself as an Auntie in a way I could not otherwise. It means flying home to see the family is a whole lot cheaper than it is for a clan.

Some days I envy my married friends. Other days I look at all they deal with in a day and wonder how they can still be such lovely people. I am single and satisfied, but tired of defending my status.

*Wan pis: one piece, single, alone, but it could also mean one fish…gotta love Tok Pisin!

Sindaun nating: sit-down nothing, to do nothing with your life, to laze around, to live off others.

** We have approximately 50 single women and 5 single guys in the Branch… but this post is about the women.