Gathering Community: A Letter from Africa
From UVE’s May 2022 Newsletter
By: Abbey Kingdon Smith
Dear Friends,
My intrepid daughter Maezy did not want to get her typhoid shot for travel to Zimbabwe. We sat in the little room at the Rite Aid in Alturas with a kind pharmacist who patiently waited for her.To help her relax, he asked her questions about her upcoming fifth trip to the Africa Centre for Holistic Management with me. He told us stories about his childhood in Uganda and his family in India. The 11-day boat ride from Uganda to India. His method seemed to work, and after 45 minutes, she finally agreed to the shot. He even called the next day to check on her and chat with her. I could hear him chuckling at her dramatic responses to his questions.
His stories served the purpose of getting Maezy's mind off the typhoid needle, and after the trip to the pharmacy, I could have easily forgotten about them, but they stayed with me as we traveled to Africa. He told us about little villages with mango trees everywhere, playing until dark with his friends, running barefooted on dusty roads, and the smell of baking bread filling the whole village. Healthy food everywhere, friends and family everywhere. But it is all gone now, he said sadly.
What happened? What happened to cause that community to disappear? What took away the abundant food? To make the streets unsafe for children? I don't know enough about Ugandan history to understand, but I wondered if my town had parallel themes.
At a recent community meeting, a Northern Paiute elder who lives in the Fort Bidwell Indian Community talked about her childhood here. How everyone had gardens and orchards, how the ice cream truck would come through the streets in the summer, and all the kids would run down to chase it. Where did it go? Where are the gardens? The orchards? The ice cream truck?
Something happened between the generation of people in their 70s and 80s and those in their 40s and younger. And it happened in Uganda and the United States (and everywhere from what I can gather from my vantage point as the Savory Global Network Coordinator). I am sure the answer is complex, and I don't know what it is, but I want to figure it out.
It wasn't that long ago! We can remember. I asked my father about it, and he said that he remembers broccoli seedling starts being sold for $1.35 and a crown of broccoli sold for the same price.
"It was cheaper not to grow it yourself," he said. Did the commoditization of food (to make it cheaper) erode community and culture? If so, that is the definition of unintended consequence.
During a visit with the Savory team to the Jambezi community in Zimbabwe to learn about their work with holistic planned grazing and herding, Allan Savory turned to me as we stood in line for lunch.
"This is why we love to work with communities, such good people," he said. "It can be so simple." He said this as a reflection of their community's holistic context.
According to Allan, a holistic context has always been missing in human history. It is why civilizations create desertification and ultimately fail.
If we saw the orchards, the gardens, the ice cream truck, the mango trees, the bread baking, the children playing until dark as something we could lose, something we need to consider and cherish, instead of externalizing them—putting them outside our choices—and not accounting for them in our calculations of wealth and prosperity, where would they be now? Would our children get to know this way of life instead of hearing about it from elders and imagining what it felt like?
I read that the best time to plant a tree was five years ago, and the second-best time is right now. Perhaps the same is true for creating a holistic context.
What are your thoughts?
I look forward to learning from you.
With love,
Abbey