Communitas
Tucker Frye
Turner talks about the term of Communitas. The idea is that a group of people, all in a state of liminality, naturally create a type of community in which everyone is equal. There is some sort of underlying structure, but over all, there are no set rules. Only a silently agreed upon code of ethics exists. While we have talked about Communitas mostly as it applies to the Appalachian Trail, I have seen it in my own experience. In 2010, my family took a trip to Hohoe, Ghana. We stayed in an orphanage here for twelve days. The area was extremely primitive. The orphanage was by far the nicest part of the village. Literally, people had huts for houses and ate what they found for the day. The kids in the orphanage were wild. We combined our efforts during the morning and early afternoon with a few other volunteers who were staying at a hotel and taught each grade level. The harder part for my family however was that we never left the orphanage. So after a full day of teaching and keeping kids under control, we would just continue taking care of kids. Soon we had developed our own form of Communitas. The little amount of alone time each volunteer had often was spent sleeping in our room. When others would come in, there was a full understanding of how the other person felt and a non-verbal set of rules was put in place. No waking up sleepers, eat peanut butter sparingly, never force kids upon another volunteer: these ere some of our non-verbal rules set into place. Each volunteer understood what the others were going through because none of us had experienced anything like it. So, we had a natural community form around our inexperience.
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