Last month in Haiti I joined a rural community coming together to build twenty latrines for twenty individual families.  All members of the community contributed to the completion of each and every latrine.

Not one latrine would have been completed without the involvement of all of us in community.  Community is essential to surviving in such remote, underdeveloped circumstances—but it didn’t feel like mere survival.  It felt like real unity.

In December I witnessed a community in northern Ghana that welcomes strangers banished from their home communities because of witchcraft accusations.  This community invites alleged witches to become part of the community even though giving refuge will be a burden.  The struggle of these individual outsiders becomes the struggle of the community as a whole.  And the solutions for the refugees become solutions for the community.

Before that I worked at a school in Uganda struggling for recognition and legitimate placement in the larger community.  Kasese Humanist Primary School is one of three humanists schools in a nation that requires students to answer questions like, “Who is your Lord and savior?” in order to graduate from school.  Yet, at our going away party, a member of the board of education told us and the gathered crowd of faculty, students, and parents that he welcomed the school and its contribution to the welfare of the community.  The chief of the village similarly thanked us for coming and supporting a school that has done so much for the children of his community.

Communities such as these are novel in my life. I have never experienced such community in the States.  That’s not to say they don’t exist in the States.  I know they exist, just not in my experience.

To me, community means something more than a group of people with common interests or goals.  Community is more even than a support system.  A healthy community supports and uplifts every member.  A sick community leaves individual members to fend for themselves.  Yes, some of the fittest individuals will survive, but no individual can thrive as an island.

Living in an authentic, healthy community means every member is equal in the community.  It means meeting each person and saying, “It’s not just your problem.  It’s our problem—my problem.  We will work on it together.”  It means asking of every person, “What do you need to be happy?”  That’s what authentic faith communities do.  In my opinion, faith communities have traditionally been the primary communities serving in this function.

So, in that sense, it is unfortunate that institutionalized religions are losing numbers. Raised in a nonreligious household—one of the growing numbers of families dropping out of institutionalized religious communities—I’m sure has contributed to why I lacked the sense of an authentic community as a child.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe my experience is an anomaly.  I would like to think so.  But I don’t think so.  I think we in the States are largely losing authentic community.  And the communities we do have are often created from the inside out by a process of exclusion.  The lines of who is in are defined by who is out.  In terms of community, how authentic is that?

What we need today are not fundamentally exclusive communities, but authentic communities that participate in forging authentic community with others.  Christians with Hindus.  Jews with Muslims.  Religious with atheist. Inclusive not exclusive. I’m not suggesting that we erase the lines that makes individual communities unique.  I’m not arguing for one homogeneous community.  That is impractical and disrespectful to individual dignity.  I’m not even recommending that communities stop their private activities.  I’m suggesting that disparate communities meet each other as they meet themselves—as equals struggling in the same fight for happiness.

My point is not that we need to boost institutionalized religious numbers.  That is not my place nor prerogative.  Healthy faith communities create and grow authentic community.  But they are not the only healthy communities—and there are certainly faith communities that are anything but healthy.  Regardless of faith, healthy, authentic communities heal a violent world—especially communities that unite disparate people.  The extinction of healthy communities would entail the extinction of humanity.  Humanity might survive and thrive by expanding the scope of authentic community—from supporting and uplifting just us to supporting and uplifting all of us.

This post was originally posted on State of Formation.

Step 1:

Find a hole, a deep hole. This should be easy as the Haitians dig their own latrine holes once they hear you are coming.

Step 2:

Cut some wood to cover the hole.  Machete is the prefered tool for this step. 

Step 3:

Cover the whole with the wood.

Step 4:

Make sure you leave a hole big enough. Measure twice, cut once. Or follow the Haitians lead and measure five times then ignore your measurements.

Step 5:

Cut more wood.  

Step 6:

Cover the old wood with the new wood. Make sure it’s flat. (Note: It’s not going to be flat. You’re cutting with machetes!)

Step 7:

Nail both layers of wood together. (Note: in Haiti you will be using ungalvanized nails that really don’t like to cooperate. There will be dozens of dead nails when you finish.)

Step 8:

Cover the wood with a layer of rebar. Don’t forget to tie them together so the don’t roll out of place.

Step 9:

Dig four holes to place four posts in. (Don´t worry, you have not cut the posts yet. That`s next.)

Step 10:

Saw some wood.

Step 11:

Nail the posts together after putting them in the holes. (Try hard to make it level and square, but don`t worry, it won`t be. The Haitians have the same attitude toward right angles as they have toward measuring.  Close is good enough.)

Step 12:

Admire your casita after the concrete is poured and set. (Don’t worry, this step happens without you.)

Step 13:

Add some more wood to attach the zinc to.

Step 14:

Nail corrugated zinc to your wood structure. (Note: this will be very loud.)

Step 15:

You`re not done yet.  You still need a door.  Saw more wood.

Step 16:

Nail more.

Step 17:

Cut zinc to fit your door frame.

Step 18:

Attach the door and you are finished.  (Don`t forget to allow your camera battery to die so that you don’t have a photo of the final product to show off.)

Step 19:

Congratulations! You have built a latrine in Haiti.

Step 20:

(Note: This is an unusual latrine design, even for us, even for Haiti. This will be used by two families so they built a structure with two doors and two holes.

Life happens outside in La Fond-Jeanette.  With corrugated zinc roofs, during the day the houses are too hot.  Without electricity, at night they are too dark.  At any time of day neighbors could and would visit our house to talk.  The maze-like trails that connect every house on the mountain pass through many yards on their way.  Several times a day a person passed through our yard with a bucket of water on their head on the way home from the river or carrying the day’s harvest of chinas (like oranges, but better) in the basket made with the front of their shirt.  These passings are not intrusions but moments of community coherence.  The meetings are part of the lattice of community that is essential to survive in these mountains.

It is because of this pervasive sense of community, I believe, that the mason—who patiently taught us how to build latrines in Haiti—went out of his way to help us down the mountain.  He met us at 4am at our house, which is about a 30 minute climb down one mountain and up another from his house.  To catch the truck out of the mountains we needed to hike two and a half hours up and down the mountains.  He walked with us.  He walked with us in the dark and in the cold merely to provide an extra strong back just in case our packs became too heavy for any one of us to carry alone.  Then he turned right back around and walked home.

The importance of community—of life sustaining community—was most obvious to me as we constructed the latrines.  The latrines are small structures that only a few people can work on at any one time.

Conor and Ben place the first layer of a latrine structure as locals watch.

Yet several of the men whose homes were getting latrines came to each site to help.  Indeed as each structure progressed more and more people showed up.  This might also have something to do with the novelty of Americans working on the site.  Still, I got the sense that building the 20 latrines was considered one united project, rather than as individual structures.  It was a community building project and it did not matter that this one was not theirs.

This kind of community is striking to me.  It shouldn’t be, but it is.  The ease at which neighbors pass through each other’s space, the selflessness the mason showed in his actions toward us strangers, and the united team of builders are not how I have experienced community.  In the States, I didn’t even know many of my neighbors and several of them we avoided because of some often trivial infraction in the past.  We lived inside.  We rarely met each other—even more rarely without an appointment.  When a windstorm blew a tree into my neighbor’s house we all sympathized with their predicament, but most of us returned to our home thankful our house remained intact.  I believe the residents of La Fond-Jeanette would have rebuilt that house together in a matter of days.  Of course this is not entirely fair.  There are many communities in the States that help and support each other selflessly.  But my experience has rarely been of as unselfconscious a community as La Fond-Jeanette.

We’d spent the day waiting.  The plan was to leave in the morning, but morning came and we were already a day behind, so we waited.  Just when we thought that we were going to be delayed another day, our contact with Children of the Border showed up at our hotel in Pedernales in the Dominican Republic.  She came with a truck full of supplies for the latrines we were going to build in Haiti.

On the truck, on top of the supplies, ready to go to Haiti.

It was 5pm, a couple hours until dusk, and we had no idea how long the journey would be.  Still, we threw our bags into the back and jumped on after them.  We arranged ourselves on the 2x4s and headed for the border.

Since we were not crossing at an official border crossing—no stamps for our passports—we did not know when the border was crossed.  There were a couple possibly official possibly unofficial stopping points.  Each time there was lots of discussion in rapid Spanish.  Each time one of the men would come to the back of the truck, greeted us, and shake each of our hands.  Turns out that none of these stops was the border.  The border was a dry river bed that we crossed unceremoniously later.

After about an hour and a half, at dusk, we arrived.  We arrived at a building standing alone in the mountains.  It was a large rectangular concrete building with a huge cement pad in front.  It looked more like a storage facility than a home, because it was.  We unpacked all the supplies and discovered that this was just a halfway point.  Another truck was supposed to meet us and take us the rest of the way.  It had already left.

We waited.  Our first truck left.  There was no telling when the second truck would return.  It could be an hour or five, that night or the next morning.  I leaned on the supplies piled on the concrete and watched the stars.  I saw a dozen shooting stars.  The others tried to befriend a puppy that was wandering around.  Several Haitian men met us there and they taught us some Creole words in exchange for English ones.  They built a fire and threw corn cobs directly into the flames.  When the leaves were burned they pulled them off and threw the naked cobs back in the fire.  When a cob was deemed done someone would hand it to one of us—straight from the fire it was too hot to hold.  We had to juggle them from hand to hand until they were cool enough to eat.

After dinner we put on extra clothes to lie under the stars and go to sleep.  At 3:15am the second truck arrived.  So we packed the supplies and jumped in.  This time the road was bumpier than before.  This time the turns were sharper.  This time the hills were steeper.  This time there was no room for sitting.  This time we stood hanging on to the metal frame over the bed.  This time we dodged low branches and grabbed low hanging fruit off the vine.

Around 5am we stopped—seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  I could see no sign of civilization except the unpaved road we were parked on.  But we disembarked.  Finally we were there.  A house emerged from the darkness as we began to unload the supplies.  The strongest among us carried the wood, zinc, and concrete into the house and yard while the rest of us lit their way with our headlamps and flashlights.

I was ready for my bed.  But instead of my bed I was given bad news.  Again, we were not at our house, we were at the mason’s house.  We still had to walk to our house and we were waiting for dawn to get started.  I don’t know how long we waited—I slept some in my chair at the dining room table—but we didn’t wait for dawn.  We put on our packs and started walking without any idea how far we were going or how long it would take.  Turned out our house was the 45 minutes away on the next mountain over.  We had to descend into a valley and ascend the next mountain.  By the time we got there the sun had risen.  We went to bed about 8am and slept until lunch.

The day was long, uncomfortable, full of changed plans, and it was wonderful.