By Christa Van Daele
Published in September 2013
Sometimes small groups working together, both in and around The Working Centre, burst beyond the borders of The Working Centre’s beehive buzz into places of teaching and learning all over town. Special moments in such small groups remind us exactly what structures of aliveness can feel like. I call these “inside out” structures, where atmosphere and feeling precedes a clear plan.
The term was first introduced to me by long time community builder, Peter Block, who studied the architectural ideas of Christopher Alexander to consider the meaning and form of intelligent design for a living local commons. Recent experiences have reminded us that these tend to be times when, without a brilliant strategic plan of any kind, yet with qualities of a sustained spontaneous faith, new community forms take interesting, sometimes roughhewn shapes, where none had previously existed. How does this dynamic actually work, in practice?
The idea is that structures of aliveness can emerge from latent understandings, from community friendships, when a common purpose is genuinely embraced. In hindsight, emerging forms are clearly visible in a project now called the First Rohingya Language School, operating in 2013 out of the St Louis Centres for Adult Learning and Continuing Education. Informal ideas for the support of children’s learning in their own language were hatched in embryonic form in 2012 around improvised downtown public café meeting spaces and homes. The outcome of something called a “Saturday morning school” that grew from a “homework club” arose, as many projects do, from sustained conversation among friends.
Good Work News readers may be aware of the distressing CBC and newspaper reports about the suffering of the Muslim Rohingya people, who have fled their native homeland of Burma in waves to land in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other countries in response to ongoing genocide – issues which are only drastically escalating this year, in 2013, despite regime changes in Burma.Like many other refugee groups, Rohingya people often live in refugee camps close to two decades before successfully filing applications to enter Canada. Defined as stateless by the Burmese government, the Rohingya people no longer have a home of their own, bereft of citizenship and, to date, lacking a written language of their own.
“It is true that Rohingya people have sometimes been in camps in Bangladesh for close to 20 years before finding a way to get to Canada,” says Anwar, a Rohingya leader who has progressively attracted Working Centre supporters and many dedicated friends in local church groups to the issues since that time. “In the camps,” Anwar adds, “normal human behaviour is gone. There is only survival to think about. Survival behaviour. The Rohingya know they are not wanted in Bangladesh; cruelties and deep corruption are often present in the camps, on top of the original trauma in Burma, where civil liberties were systematically stripped away over generations. When Rohingya people come to Canada, they have lost all sense of themselves, of how to work, how to help one another.” Anwar concludes that the helplessness and negative behaviours learned in the camps have hugely depleted a store of ordinary belief in the value of their own lives, making life for the Rohingya in an Ontario community extremely difficult.
What are some ways that Anwar and his spouse Zainab have moved forward to support the children and Rohingya parents in our local community? Initially assisted by the strong support of Bonnie Adams, a longtime refugee advocate, Anwar and Zainab opened a Homework Club to help Rohingya kids function better in math skills. “The missing piece was the Rohingya language,” shared Zainab, a former math teacher in Burma. “We wanted to instruct the kids in their own language, as they were missing so many concepts that are taught in English in the schools.”
The simple hospitality of a basement room offered by a Rohingya parent gradually extended into friendly potlucks, then connecting with Working Centre friends to help strengthen the overall effort. Lutfiye Tutak, an employment counsellor with organizing experience in the Turkish community, and Bonnie Adams and myself, a longtime Working Centre person, started to meet regularly with Anwar and Zainab to review steps. Explosions of genocide news from Burma directly penetrated Anwar and Zainab’s thoughts throughout our meetings of the last four months, adding sorrow and weight to our meetings. Discussions moved on to explore opportunities of in kind community help. Could we find a more spacious, permanent classroom? Could we find money for snacks and for texts and workbooks?
Outreach attempts in 2012 worked. Mosaic Family Counselling offered an air conditioned boardroom in the hot summer of 2012, and repeated the offer this summer. United Way and the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation donated a start-up fund for supplies and bus tickets. A teaching stipend for Zainab, the key teacher, allowed the launch of a Rohingya language-teaching initiative with support from Lilianna Sosnowski and the Waterloo Catholic District School Board. St. Francis School off Queen’s Boulevard offered a new home. The Working Centre rounded out practical supports with financial administration.
The First Rohingya Language School is thus named because, in fact, it is the first Rohingya language school in the world. To our great surprise, our celebratory K-W project launch created an unexpected ripple through Facebook. Rohingya individuals around the world connect with the page weekly. We are delighted that a second Rohingya language school opened in the summer of 2013.
Through the liaison work of Anwar, an educator in the Malaysian Rohingya refugee community, inquired about the logistics of our Kitchener-based start-up. It has been radically instructive for our Kitchener group to realize that photographic images of our school’s activities, and a Kevin Nunn’s lively logo, has stimulated a dialogue with potential Rohingya community builders in other parts of the world.
Our official launch on May 11, 2012, was a time of joy. Warm spoken messages of congratulation were shared by Stephen Woodsworth MP, and Carl Zehr, Mayor of Kitchener, among other guests. The children of the Rohingya School dramatized their flight from Bangladesh in a dramatic presentation, reciting poetry and song that shared their dreams, interspersed by live music from Rohingya musicians and a powerful personal statement by Anwar.
Friends from Reception House, Mosaic Family Counselling, Muslim Social Services, The Working Centre, and the Muslim Women’s Coalition, and representatives of the Turkish community stood by the founding group to celebrate together. Amazing deserts were contributed by Turkish friends of the project.
What have we learned? We are still digesting it all, while studying the next steps. Collective moments of human change and growth reach stability and structure, while also striving to retain a fluid, playful, and nimble atmosphere. We have aimed for the spirit of servant leadership, following rather than leading. We have learned the value of starting small, working hard, accepting and including the gifts of others at each step. We continue to reflect.
It is my observation that relationships, strengthened by organic and socially productive forms, overflow into friendship, silently weaving through all intentions, creating an interesting “holy something” from “nothing”. “The imagination is part of our lives,” said Dorothy Day to psychiatrist Robert Coles in a taped interview. “Part of reality. The responsibility is to hope, to dream.” In this spirit, the imaginative efforts of Anwar and Zainab Arkani are huge, as they connect online with disenfranchised Rohingya persons in Burma, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Our group dreams of further local/global links.
The work does entail gritty effort. There is no dream, just the everyday reality of personal stamina. Most of our human efforts, in fact, can seem unclear, as they are being lived out, in the everyday. In the dream begins the responsibility, as Dorothy Day suggests to Robert Coles. Whatever the local Rohingya community effort is, and has been, this past year, the fingertip feeling of improvised structures is one of essence and aliveness, something we may sometimes dare to say that our lives are wonderfully about.
Christa Van Daele is an educator and freelance writer who has been active at The Working Centre for 10 years.
