To build a barn...

Just recently, I found myself on a Saskatchewan highway, heading back to the tiny, rural village where both my parents grew up. It was my baba Naclia’s 90^th birthday and I was making the 9-hour trip just to be there to celebrate with her and my extended family.

This little prairie village called Norquay was where I spent most of my childhood summers. I would run amuck in the large community garden behind my grandparent’s home in the town, listening as they spoke Ukrainian to their neighbours and marveling at how easy this exotic language rolled off their tongues.

Both sides of my family immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine. My dad’s theory is that a little impoverished village in the ‘old country’ simply picked itself up, got on a boat, and relocated to the prairies in Canada. This was my parent’s hometown.

I remember, as a young child, pestering my baba (which means grandmother in Ukrainian) until she would tell me stories about the trials and hardships her family experienced when they first came to Canada. She had tried to explain her experiences to me but I never really understood. My world was too soft and too easy and I was too young to make the leap.

Often when I speak now to people about ACE Communities initiatives, I refer to them as ‘barn raisers’. When I use this term, I back it up by using an example from my family’s life. It was my baba (on my mother’s side) who told me about the importance of community when she was young. There are many romantic stories of the homesteaders on the prairies that gloss over the challenges that they truly faced.

“When my parents landed in Canada,” she once told me, “there were no prairies, only forest. People always talk about how the prairies in Saskatchewan go on forever but the only reason they do is because we pulled the trees out with our bare hands. Can you imagine?”

I couldn’t imagine it at all.

The homesteaders were under a lot of pressure in those days to keep their ‘free’ land. Government obligations had to be met. This meant that acres of trees had to be cleared and that each family had to have an actual house built before the first year on their homestead was up.

And so, it was then that community not only meant the companies of others, it meant survival of both individual families and of the town itself. One neighbour helped build his neighbour’s barn and house and so their land was helped cleared in return. Connectivity was how they survived the initial harshness of their new life together in Canada.

I’m reminded of this community spirit whenever I return to my parent’s hometown. I’m reminded of how too often we wait for tragedy to strike before we unite as a community. Instead, as a child in my grandparents’ village, community came together to cook together in the town hall for a young couple’s wedding. They came together to harvest the autumn crops. And, of course, they often came together to build the occasional barn.

So tell me, what ‘barn raiser’ can you plan for your community?