Creating Community On The Road
October 29, 2012 in Asia, Thailand, Travelogue
“This is almost as good as Camp Wood!”
Ezra announced, with a grin of delight before he snapped his goggles back over his eyes and bombed back into the pool.
That’s high praise. Camp Wood is the annual campout that our home school community in NH puts on instead of sending our kids to camp. It’s a five star blast. We’re sad every year that we miss it.
“Don’t your kids miss their friends?”
“What do you do about socialization?”
Of course they do (and so do their parents!)
What do we do about it?
We create community.
We’re traveling so that our kids can learn about the world. Their world. The world is made up of places, but more importantly, it’s made up of people.
Community can be found, or created, anywhere if you’re open to it.
- We’ve created community on long bus rides
- Camped in the jungle
- With music
- On long hikes
- In boats on the Perfume River
- In hostel common rooms
- Around countless dinner tables and picnic blankets
It starts with being open.
“Don’t talk to Strangers” has to be the single worst piece of cultural brainwashing done to my generation. All the best people are strangers and they all have fantastic stories to tell.
Last night we sat around a pool and watched seven kids splash and carry-on like frogs in the rain. Some music was played. Some laughter shared. In fact, I think we’ve had dinner alone exactly once since the 6th of September.
Who have we been spending so much time with?
- Bohemian Travelers
- Travel With Bender
- Worldschool Adventures
- Going Anyway
- A King’s Life
- The Gabell-Davenport Family
- Some Swiss folks we found camped on the beach
- The Kirk Family, who crashed our pool party.
And people worry that travel is isolating, or that our kids won’t have playmates, or that we’ll suffer from lack of “Community.”
Au Contraire.
Because we travel, our community is ever expanding.
It includes, literally, hundreds of people who have fantastic lives and stories that we get to share a tiny slice of because we happen to be here, instead of there. Our kids have learned from Jazz greats, to the military top brass because we’ve cross paths and shared dinners on the road.
Travel is a great equalizer. You might be staying at the Four Seasons and we might be camped in our hammocks, but over beers on the beach much common ground is found among people who share expatriation and it’s surreal “between worlds” experience.
This week we celebrated Amy’s birthday on the beach with sand and sun, a magical purple sunset, painted just for her and we released a Thai paper lantern into an ink black sky, carrying with it the wishes of many laughing children and parents with full hearts.
Today we are making costumes for a party tomorrow night. Halloween is very important and very missed by two little boys in our current community, so we’re going to do it up Thai-style-right for them. Even the big people are dressing up. There’s going to be a “talent show.” If we’re lucky, Hannah WON’T humiliate us all by posting the videos to Youtube. Excitement is running high.
Tonight I’m making pork roast, potatoes and carrots for 9 in my toaster oven… we’re hoping to make that 13 if the Sztupovszkys make it back from their visa run on time. The party just migrates from house to beach to house, in much the same way that it did on long summer days in our community in New Hampshire.
How do you create community in your world? Do you have questions about what it’s like for us while traveling?
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Beautiful post. We love being part of your community and this last few months in Penang have been full! <3 to you and yours.
So happy to have shared so much time with you and your family and to feel so connected to you. Whether at home or on the road it is the people that make life beautiful!
We always miss you too when you can’t make it to Camp Wood!
Every day in my restaurant! It is a job, but I realize that it is so much for me. It’s my gift of hospitality at work . Have met so many wonderful people,some seen only occasionally but so many who’ve become real friends that we share our lives with. Love you all and miss you tremendously! Thank you ,Lord for Internet!
Are you naturally an extrovert? I find myself always wanting to talk to people & get to know them, but don’t know how to start. I don’t feel like I have anything great to talk about
Alice, I don’t know if I’m naturally an extrovert, but I learned early the value of talking to strangers and inviting people to share meals. This has always been part of our family culture, since I was a little child, and my parents had a continual parade of interesting folks through our dinner table. Hours of sitting and listening to people talk and tell their stories was an important part of our educations, and continues to be for my children. Talking to people is easy… just say hi… the Swiss people we ate with last week were camped on the beach in their cool truck… we just knocked on the door, complimented their truck, explained who we are and that we lived here and would love to trade dinner for their travel stories… it’s pretty easy. 🙂
[…] are one month in to our six months away. We are learning lessons on traveling with children, on finding community, and on going with the flow. There are many more lessons to […]
I love how you invite people to trade dinner for their travel stories. Ever since I first heard that concept, in a much earlier blog post, I’ve been mulling it over in my mind and I know when we begin our own adventure we will put it into practice – if not before!