Community

El Padre is away traveling for a training again this week. As I am mostly parenting alone this week I am reminded of the community here in the Sahel. A couple weeks ago there was a knock at our gate.

I answered it to find the son of our neighbor. He said that his mother was 'calling' Sunny to come and see her. She needed help with something and she was not ashamed or timid or afraid or deterred to ask for help from a neighbor teenager. And he was glad to help quickly responding to her request. I pondered this. Would I be willing to call upon our neighbors to help me with a smallish request like buying some eggs? Absolutely not. Now since Sunny lives in our home, I do ask him to run errands from time to time, but I would never ask a neighbor to run my errand! I am too grounded on I can do it myself and don't need to let anybody know if there is an area where help would really make things easier. I will go out of my way to do it myself and never let anyone know how inconvenient it really was for me. If there were an emergency for us in country, I know we would end up relying on our neighbors, but I am talking about day to day help.

Oh I still have a lot to learn! May my heart be open to continuing to learn vulnerability from our neighbors.

-- La Maestra