Compassion is local too

The example of the Amish and the Mennonites came up several times during the week I spent with a team doing clean up and recovery work along the Gulf coast. Hurricane Katrina hit the end of last summer, and as this spring begins it seems the recovery work has hardly begun. Many people are still waiting for insurance companies and government agencies to fix things.

And yet some communities have made great strides. Everywhere there is lots to be done. But at least some communities can take comfort in the fact that they have already done quite a bit. They are the communities that didn't wait for someone to come rescue them. They're the communities that rolled up their sleeves and started doing what they could with whatever resources they had. Once those ministries were rolling along, outside groups could come in and help.

The Amish example works in this way: when a barn burns down in an Amish community, they don't wait for some outside agency or corporation to come in and help. The community bands together and has a good old barn raising. No forms to fill out, no applications and appeals process to run through, no claims adjuster findings to dispute. See the need, meet the need.

So some communities have made some strides to get back on their feet. And others are still waiting.

Some have written quite passionately about how the magnitude of last summer's disasters shows the need for a government welfare sector. (I responded to one essay in a previous post, "In the Katrina disaster, who abandoned whom?")I continue to believe, and my experience on the Gulf coast in March reinforced that belief, stronger bureaucracies will not produce a more compassionate society. Compassion happens between people, not between agencies and clients.

Many years ago, I worked with a food pantry that received some support through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Association. The routine paperwork we had to deal with was annoying. But I remember thinking things like it's a time consuming annoyance to deal with this now -- but what if we ever have an actual emergency? We had one, and it turned out just like I thought it would.

Human needs aren't solved by agencies and bureaucracies. It does take a village: the people in the village coming together to help each other.

Strangely enough, two politicians I seldom agree with made the same point last fall. People "eager to transform the developing world are well advised to forgo political life and instead pour their efforts into non-governmental organizations -- or so say Paul Martin and Bill Clinton." Many reports of their remarks have been pulled from the web, but an account is still available at the University of Toronto news archive site.

Many years ago, when I studied political science, I learned the truism "all politics is local," not a matter of grand issues and concerns, but of ordinary things like pothole filling and such. In a similar sense, I rather think all compassion is local as well. Not a matter of grand strategies and bold initiatives, but of block by block, family by family cleaning, rebuilding, restoring.