Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 77

I wake up late and stay in bed with my coffee and ipad for a couple of hours before getting on the phone with a friend in Manchester. We don’t even deliberate about whether to use Zoom. We’re both on it all week, so phone it is.

Then it’s time to get ready for our first official social distanced double date. We’ve arranged to meet my cousin, Sebastian, and his wife, Angelita, in Regent’s Park. It was Angelita’s birthday last weekend and I want to give her a jar of manjar.

I also want to give her a life sized carved wooden bunny.

I bought it years ago at a second-hand shop on Holloway Road. It had been one of about a hundred that were specially made for a Harrods Easter advert. It’s got big pointy ears, and legs and arm that move like a marionette’s.

It was my partner’s birthday and they are the year of the rabbit in Chinese astrology so I immediately thought of them when I saw it. I brought it home and put it on our bed to surprise my partner when they got home.

But instead of being delighted by the bunny, it disturbed them. So it ended up sitting on a high shelf in our front room, getting very little love from us. We never even named it.

Last year we threw a Day of the Dead party and invited Sebastian and Angelita. When her eyes caught sight of that bunny they lit up as though she’d seen an old friend. I took the bunny off the high shelf and handed it to her.

At that moment, watching her hold it and move its appendages around, bringing it to life, I thought about giving it to her. But I was attached to it, even though I hardly ever paid it any attention. I didn’t give her the bunny.

In one of the Buddhist teachings on generosity there is an invitation to follow-through on any and all spontaneous impulses to give, without a second thought. The reason for this is because the egoic mind will stifle those initial impulses very quickly.

We need to learn to trust those impulses and we learn to trust them by going with them. This has been an ongoing practice for me, to trust in my initial innate generosity before selfishness kicks in.

So today I’m giving my cousin’s wife the bunny. The gift I should have given her back on the 2nd of November, when we could still have parties and give each other gifts.

We get to the park and wait in the grass by the gates. When my cousin and his wife arrive we blow kisses in the air to say hello. In Chile the standard greeting is a kiss on the cheek.

In fact, I was taught that when you enter a room full of people, you must go around and give everyone a kiss on the cheek to say hello, regardless of whether or not you know them. This may never happen again because of coronavirus.

We find a quiet spot that’s half sun/half shade and set up for our picnic. Then I give Angelita her gifts. Her face lights up again, just like that night last November.

She tells us she’s thought about the bunny many times since the party and my partner admits that the bunny looks happier in her arms. She asks us if it has a name and we say no.

She’s holding it and moving its arms and legs around, bringing it to life again. I tell her I was imagining she might want to cut its head off. Not to decapitate it, but to re-attach it in a way that it can also be moved around.

The jar of manjar also goes down well. She’s laughing as she takes it out of the gift bag, telling me she also has a gift for us. It’s another homemade jar of manjar. But hers is actually homemade, not just from a can of condensed milk that’s been boiled for three hours.

She tells me how’s she’s made it from powdered milk and sugar in a crockpot. I’m impressed. I guess my plan to give up manjar will have to be put off for a little while longer.

There is something deeply cathartic about hanging out with Sebastian and Angelita. They are family. My only family in 3,280 miles.

We spend the rest of the afternoon talking about how we’ve passed the time during the lockdown and what I’m learning from my interviews with my Dad. In the early evening we say good-bye and head back home.

When we get home I see a Facebook post from an old colleague of mine from the community centre in San Francisco. He’s made a video telling all his Black friends that he stands in solidarity with them as a Samoan-American.

Sam led our safety and support team. Their job was to ensure the safety of everyone in the centre in the afterschool and evening hours, particularly those kids that were too cool to come along to one of our programmes, but couldn’t go home for whatever reason and didn’t want to end up hanging out on the streets.

Of course, the kids never told us all that. The community centre was strategically located within a school. This was by design. These kids literally didn’t have anywhere else to go. So instead of forcing them to “sign up” to something, we simply let them hang out. And Sam and his team got to know them. And that’s how they created safety.

And over time they started to get interested in what was happening around them, and sometimes we’d order them pizza and hand them a drum and the next thing they knew they were performing in Carnaval, an annual neighborhood festival and parade.

Sam and his team sometimes broke up fights. But they always did it with love. Then they’d talk to the kids, blood streaming down their faces and tears in their eyes, and get them to talk it out and apologise to each other.

They were trained in how to de-escalate and mediate conflicts. But what made them so good at their jobs was that they were from the neighborhood. They’d grown up on the same streets as our kids and they knew what was at stake.

They’d walk around the school, a huge Spanish style building with two massive courtyards surrounded by three floors of classrooms and offices, with walkie talkies, asking each other “what’s your 20?” as they did the rounds.

This is how they would communicate with one another as they opened up the classrooms for our after school activities, making sure there weren’t any kids hanging around where they shouldn’t be, and rounding them up and bringing them back to the centre with promises of hot pizza and free computer games.

At the beginning of the lockdown we had a Zoom reunion, all of us who’d worked at the community centre in the early 2000’s. We talked about how innovative and experimental it was, what we were trying to do back then. How we had to bend so many rules and sometimes break them to get away with some of the stuff we did.

But I know because of being friends with a lot of those kids to this day, thanks to social media, that it made all the difference in the world to them.

We didn’t try to police them, or tell them how to live their lives, or how to protest, or how to fight for what’s right. We simply treated them with respect, honored their dignity and gave them a space to explore their identities.

We gave them space to talk about their lives, and feelings, and dreams. We gave them space to play and create and mess up and learn and try again.

We gave them space to push boundaries and try new things and get challenged and question the status quo.

Later we had to fight to keep the centre going, against budget cuts and turf wars between the city and the school district.

Folks in the States are fighting now to defund the police and demand governments invest in communities. Many are calling for a vision of community that does not include police.

And when I think back to those days and what Sam and his team were doing I know it’s possible. I know it’s possible to ensure safety and support of a community without having to enforce anything.

Another world is possible, and I vow to make it real.