What makes it tick?

The Bruderhof were originally formed around World War 1 in Germany by a man called Eberhard Arnold and his family. There has been various influxes of people often around times of persecution (they were pacifist from the beginning). They escaped Germany and then England, and lived in Paraguay, the only country that would take them, for more than a decade! In Paraguay they lived with very little and a lot of hardship. Eventually they made it to the U.S in the 50s.

From the little I picked up it seemed like these were some of the aspects that helped make the community tick:

• Members are the life blood of the community. 
• You can't ask for membership until you're over 21.
• Once you ask there's a discernment process that can take a while to make sure both sides are certain of the right decision. There needs to be a unanimous vote of members to be added.
• Members make life long commitments to go where ever they're asked to go and do whatever they're asked to do. This means people are often moved to different communities within the movement to provide their skills there. eg. if a new community is setup they'll need builders plumbers electricians etc but later they'll need different skills. Many people I spoke to had been at the community in either Australia or the UK, (which was a bonus as they mostly understood our accent!)
• If a certain skill is missing someone with the aptitude may be asked to get educated in that skill. eg. a farmer was retrained as a dentist! And it sounded like that move worked well.
• Most essential supplies are on hand. Most food (including cows, chickens and eggs) are grown on the 800 acre property or at one of the other communities.
• Large harvests of food are frozen or canned to last in to winter. They harvest 100's of pounds of berries and honey for instance.
• If you get referred to an outside medical professional or need something else from the shops, book one of the fleet of cars and sign out some cash from the community steward.
• There's an on site medical centre with on call doctor. There's also a dentist and dental hygienist who are not limited by cost or politics so they are constantly looking for the latest technology to make sure their people are getting the best treatment possible. In some cases they are using techniques that are cutting edge that other American dentists are interested in as they'd upset their business model.
• People don't use computer technology in their homes including mobile phones and tv.
• Gender roles are traditional and they all where very modest clothing including head coverings for the woman.

A day in the life

• Breakfast at 6am
• Men and children over 6 weeks go to work or childcare/school
• Woman clean house then go to work at 9
• Snack is at 10
• Whole community lunch happens in the main dining room at 12.30. There may be a few announcements most  people help with clean up in the massive kitchen (there's a separate kitchen for special diets, cool eh?!) and dishes rooms.
• Men go back to work after lunch and woman and the seniors (I guess somewhere around 70+) start work at 2.
• Snack at 3.15 (when the high school kids get back from their 45 mins bus ride from the Bruderhof school)
• Finish at 5
• I didn't figure out exactly what happens with dinner. Sometimes they don't have dinner as they decided a while ago to forego some meals in solidarity with people who have a lot less food to eat.
• Often there is a meeting at 7pm inside or outside depending on the weather. Different things happen at each meeting. We went to two, one had singing and bring your own instrument the other two nights a week are family dinners which was requested by teenagers a few years back as they wanted more family time.

The gist of the Bruderhof community

Here's a quick run down of the wider community which seems fairly in line with what I've heard. "Full community of goods" = Common purse. ie. No one has any personal money everything is shared.

The gist is that they're trying to live a life that was first articulated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and the essence of that is to love one another, Everything else comes after that. There is a lot of other amazing things here to talk about but many people have wanted to emphasise that to us, that the well functioning community life all comes down to that first priority.

A special welcome

We're having a kindof community experience that I've never had before.
You know that time when you're sitting in a crowd of people you don't know and no one talks to you...? Or the time when you're hosted by people you know are super busy and tired and so you don't want to trouble them? Well, this is not one of those experiences!

This week we've been welcomed like I've never been welcomed before! The resident to guest ratio has been 100:1 (seriously!!) and most of those residents are keen to introduce themselves and swap stories and hear about our interest and experience of community. That means we've needed to manage our people time as we've been getting breakfast, lunch and dinner dates! We've certainly learned a lot about how this place runs and its on a scale I've never seen before. The whole movement has been running for more than 90 years, started in Germany and there are now more than 2500 people in 28 locations. The community we're in is one of 14 large communities (more than 150 people).

I'm hoping I'll have time to write a few posts about the place. I've only been here for less than a week so obviously I don't have the full picture but what I have seen is quite the story! There's a lot more to it that I can tell, all the ups and down of community relationships can't be picked up in a week or blogged in a few posts, so, just assume there's as many hard times as the amazing positive stories I'll tell here.

North America

We've been travelling for 2 weeks already! so much for posting regularly like previous trips!
Here's a brief run down, see Sarah's blog for more details.

• San Fran, 2 nights to see a few sights and a bit of time for me to revisit and reminisce. Once again I rode the Golden Gate bridge, its hard to beat! We also stayed at the Embassy Network which has a loose connection with my work network called Enspiral. Was interesting to get a glimpse of how they operate and their massive North American fridge with an open door policy to help yourself.
• Vancouver, 10 nights to catch up with Maria from the Greenhaus, see some sights and spend some time resting and reflecting at Rivendell retreat on Bowen Island.
• New York - 4 nights to see it for the first time. It's a crazy city that could've kept us busy for weeks! Some of the highlights for me were School of Rock on Broadway with legendary 10 year olds playing the instruments for real. The view from "30 Rock" or "Top of the rock," the Rockefeller Centre from mid town Manhatten was amazing! The Met / Metropolitan museum which is one of the biggest and most visited museums in the world and we could've easily spent multiple days in that one place, let alone the other mile of musuems...!

Now we're based at a Bruderhof community 1.5 hours north of NYC.

On the road again

Sarah and I are heading on a world trip. We're going to visit some friends, communities and a few cities on the way. Here's our plan from May 2:

- San Fran
- Vancouver and Rivendel retreat
- NYC and then a Bruderhof community
- London and L'abri and other UK
- Paris
- Taize
- Travelling from Taize to Berlin over a few days
- Berlin
- Tokyo and possible wwoofing in the country