What Do We Mean: RenegAID

One of our board members keeps reminding the rest of us to keep our focus on Natural Disaster like a focal point for a laboring mother. A focal point to distract us from the pain and fear that keeps popping into our heads. I am ever grateful for her reminders as our thoughts wonder around the landscape of chaos, expressing our opinions on what we see as haunting.

Last evening I spent time catching up on some inspiration by watching TED talks.

The one I have referenced here made me think…

Shouldn’t RenegAID be to survivors of Natural Disaster what TED talks are to inspiration and ideas? And shouldn’t RenegAID be to survivors of Natural Disasters what Burning Man is to art?

The event of natural disaster is not political. And we are about the event. In a catastrophic disaster, people who spontaneously show up to engage and help on their own volition, their own time, their own risk, their own money are called renegaid. They do whatever presents itself in the world of absolute chaos. They are not bound by policy and procedure and insurance clauses like volunteers who arrive from relief organizations such as Red Cross, etc. They are not bound by their schooling and corporate level. They are the off duty neighbors who drop what they are doing and run in to help, led by the spirit and not by rules. Rules don’t work well anyway in pure chaos. Corporations and governments exist awhile and then change but neighbors are forever.

In her TED talk, Nora Atkinson calls the Burning Man experiment in collective dreaming, off the grid, anti consumer community an “active collaborative making community.” It exists internationally year round but comes together once a year in the desert… made up of artists, scientists, welders, engineers, garbage collectors, etc. And when their time together is over, they disappear without a trace. Although the art is amazing, what inspires Nora most is why people come there again and again to make. She believes it gets to something that’s essentially human. She says that when people first come to Burning Man, they don’t know how to make this stuff. It’s the “active collaborative maker community” that makes it possible. And when artists stop worrying about critics and collectors and start making for themselves, these are the marvelous toys they create.

I loved the Burning Man people who came immediately and spontaneously to Katrina with bulldozers and tents and set up neighborhood with the Buddhist Temple. Spontaneous, engaging, willing to give of their talents and do whatever needed to be done in the moment, not worried about money or insurance. They were pretty renegaid.

Eunice
Referenced TED Talk: Why Art Thrives at Burning Man by Nora Atkinson

Japanese “wabi-sabi”: bridging the two-languages divide

Eunice has spoken about the existence of two languages – the language of order and structure and the language of chaos and regeneration. The second one works with the rebirth after disaster while the first one tends to clash with the rebirth process and wants to quickly restore what was broken.

As I read this article about the Japanese aesthetic concept of “wabi-sabi” I was struck by how this dual-language divide seems to be bridged in Japanese culture through an understanding of art and an appreciation of the marks of the “ravages of time” on an object’s appearance.

The article makes the link to disaster by suggesting that it is from the necessity created by the frequency of natural disaster that folks in Japan have learned to appreciate imperfections and brokenness as an opportunity for a new kind of beauty.

Article url: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181021-japans-unusual-way-to-view-the-world

Bjorn

Disaster and Rebirth

Eunice takes us to the Gangway this week with some words on how we should view survivors of a catastrophic disaster.. and how we should act to support them..  -dc

A Thought from the Gangway

Disaster and Rebirth are stuck together like two sides of one coin. They are one thing.
Disaster-Rebirth
Power-Weakness
Lion-Lamb
Parent-Newborn Infant
It is imbalances of power-  neither good nor evil.  It exists. And it is dynamic. It’s our reactions, responses and relation, individually and together, to its existence that makes up the entirety of our lives. And it brings out our humanness.

Survivors of catastrophic disaster are like the lamb or newborn infant. They are in the weakest form of humanness. Do we blame a newborn infant for its weakness and inability to figure life out? Do we expect a newborn infant to understand it’s unfamiliar surroundings? That newborn infant only knows that it is cold for the first time. Hungry for the first time. Alone for the first time. And afraid, needing to be comforted with a blanket and eye contact. So it is with catastrophic disaster survivors. The human senses are all screwed up. Would we leave alone a nursery full of newborn infants with plenty enough formula-filled bottles in the nursery pantry? Or even would we leave them alone with a bottle full of formula in the foot of their individual cribs?

Sending emergency relief and medical supplies into a disaster without the immediate means of local distribution and communication within a broken distribution infrastructure is like leaving the bottles of formula in the foot of the cribs and expecting the newborn infants to make the connection and survive and thrive.

If you have ever been through the process of giving birth, those closest to the situation will remember those sleepless and fearful first days and nights which flowed into weeks and months without surfacing for air. You were in it thick. You were trying to figure out how to communicate with your infant. You cried a lot. But you were also amazed a lot at the little things you were witness to. The most blatantly pure form of imbalance of power and pure potential can be seen in a mother and infant learning how to make the connection in breastfeeding. It is nature’s supply and demand at its best. And it requires a support network of those closest to the situation. When it works poorly, it can mean failure to thrive for the infant and self blame for the mother and support system.

So it is with catastrophic disaster. If supply and demand doesn’t work well, it might mean failure to thrive for the survivors as individuals and as a neighborhood. Their potential may be stunted. And for the rest of us…we are left with a horrendous feeling of guilt and shame and division and blame.

So the moral of this narrative is: Let’s get it right. Even if it takes our lifetime.

And let’s forgive ourselves and others for not truly understanding what we are up against.

-Eunice

 

Welcome to the Gangway

More thoughts on  The Gangway..

After a flood or a tornado strikes a community, a host of organizations rush on in to help.  They do this in many different ways-and some ways are better than others.  At its best, support is responsive and empowering- and helps the community transform itself.  At its worst, support is stifling, confusing, and humiliating.  Some help displaces local initiative and is merely misplaced- resulting in a ‘second disaster’ of unneeded supplies or burdensome red tape.  We want to support the best.

We call it The Gangway. This post describes the model of mutual aid for communities and the temporary connecting support structure, or “Gangway,” that is created in the process.  We have developed this concept to support our organization’s role as a project development platform.

To better understand The Gangway, consider the term “Mutual aid-” which this group describes as a voluntary and decentralized approach to offering time, energy and resources. They contrast it with conventional, top-down recovery efforts .

Renegaid calls this place of observation, support and action “the Gangway.”  Facilitators, advocates, grassroots organizers, community leaders- these kinds of people all see the gangway for its open potential that rewards initiative.  It may be a physical space, a house or church servicing as ground zero for truckloads of supplies and bright-eyed volunteers.  These kinds of places are fantastically unique- brimming with potential- yet  exists with a completely different kind of potential than glory or profit.  It tends to be  a humbling and inspiring space for group problem-solving. Leah Ayer describes West Street Recovery which sprang into being when friends and strangers reacted to Hurricane Harvey drenching Southeast Houston.

Our effort rose purely out of reaction. (…) A sign is taped to the front door encouraging the 50+ people coming through our front door to empower themselves to make decisions. The kitchen runs from sun up to sundown. Our rooms fill and empty. The backyard becomes a dishwashing station. The hallways become sleeping quarters that are packed into corners by 7 every morning. (link)

 

Why do we need the Gangway?   Mutual Aid Disaster Relief puts it best-

“Survivors of disasters look for accomplices who can assist them in achieving this communal recovery without imposing the stigma of receiving assistance. (..) [We] respond in a flexible, responsive and effective manner by not assuming everybody’s needs are the same or that we know best what a community needs, but instead acts humbly, asking, listening, and responding.

To us, disaster survivors have a right to be part of a communal recovery. We recognize survivors’ rights to determine what their needs are and how best others could assist them and we utilize the knowledge, skills and networks gained from our background in social movement organizing to respond from below, with direct action and no bureaucracy or red tape. This mutual aid, solidarity-based, grassroots approach to disaster relief, in addition to meeting the self-determined needs of disaster survivors more effectively, has the added benefit of building bridges, serving to unite disparate elements of social justice and liberation movements and build power from below.” (link)

 

Why Isn’t the Gangway The Prevailing Model for Disaster Relief?

In fact, it is- in many parts of the world.  Historically, mutual aid is the model by which friendly communities have supported each other. But in modern America this cannot be taken for granted.  Most Americans hear two different stories when looking at communities in crisis: either 1) People are rising to the occasion to save lives, or 2) People are sinking to looting, violence and panic.  Both narratives can be true and we choose to believe that more often than not, people are strong rather than weak; more courageous than cowardly; generous instead of greedy;  builders more than destroyers.  With support from the gangway- they will accomplish more than they could imagine possible.

If anything, it is the top-down model of disaster charity that disempowers people, separates them from their basic necessities.  It is not the huddled masses of survivors we should fear- it is the inhuman bureaucracies that take away their dignity and treat them like animals.

If everything we saw in the media were true, then that treatment would be justified.  Stories of rape and looting filled the airwaves in the days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Corporate media was saturated with stories that alternatingly glorified certain communities for their brave and heroic responses, and humiliated other communities for their opportunism and violence.  The narratives fit a certain, cynical logic: “If you treat people like animals, they behave like animals.”  There’s a certain truthiness to self-fulfilling prophecies such as this.  They believe that “civilization is but a thin veneer” that is abandoned when hunger or desperation sets in.  From this perspective, it takes armed guards to feed hungry crowds; armed guards to patrol the shelters; armed guards to hand out tarps and bandaids.   It sounds ridiculous and yet it happens routinely after disasters.

These stories of looting, violence and panic on the TV- are overwhelmingly false.  We don’t believe the narrative that communities ‘deserve’ such humiliating aid.  We are not being idealistic when we assert that outside of the myths of the television set, an entirely consistent pattern of heroic and compassionate behavior sets in after a disaster.

The Gangway represents our hope and ideals taking flight- a part of the Restorative Narrative – that when you treat survivors with empathy, dignity and inspired support- you can make a real difference.  Let us not forget that our best friends are not the ones who always tell us what we want to hear.  They are there to support us in the long-haul.  As partners in mutual aid we are not in the business of short-term “feel-goodism.”  In the Gangway, we are in the business of empowering those in the worst of times and facilitating their basic emotional and material needs.