August 2007

Alternative Routes
Blog posting #10
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

Ed Belzer and his grandson Joe tilling the garden.

We city-folk, myself included, tend to romanticize rural life. As we visit these communities, and see them for a brief moment through our outsiders’ eyes, it’s easy to continue this tendency. We probably don’t see a lot of the trials and struggles, conflict, tension, and difficulties inevitably associated with sharing our lives with others.

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Alternative Routes
Blog posting #9
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

Maison Emmanuel

A lot of the people we are meeting talk about community as an alternative to institutionalization.

Nowhere has this been more tangible than with the communities of people with disabilities with whom we have spent time — l’Arche Saint John (described in the previous posting) and Maison Emmanuel in Quebec.

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Alternative Routes
Blog posting #8
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

Shayna, John, Gray, and Debbie dancing at Debbie’s

birthday party.

“If we are accepted with our limitations as well as our abilities, community gradually becomes a place of liberation.”

I am sitting at the kitchen table in a community called l’Arche Saint John, in Saint John New Brunswick.

L’Arche Saint John is part of a network of l’Arche communities worldwide [http://www.larche.org/] that provide a community environment for people with developmental disabilities. Live-in assistants share their lives with the “core members” with a be with rather than do for mentality.

I am reading a book by Jean Vanier, the founder of l’Arche. Vanier starts off the book by describing some of the challenges of living in community. He describes community as a place where “our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us.”

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Alternative Routes
Blog posting #7
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

The Causeway connecting Prince Edward Island to the mainland

Victoria-by-the-Sea, a town on Prince Edward Island of 140-some people in the summer (and half that in the winter), has me thinking about the need that many people feel to know where their energy is going, and to see its results. This need is the spirit of entrepreneurship, and it runs deep in Victoria.

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Alternative Routes
Blog posting #6
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

Touring the Waldegrave farm with participants from the Otesha Project

For me, this trip is largely about matching our behaviours to our words; about putting our philosophies and theories and complaints aside, and replacing them with tangible, authentic action.

One community we visited, a place called Waldegrave Farm, outside of Tatmagouche, Nova Scotia, fully embodies this spirit of action.

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“There’s a time and a place for the media,” explained a plainclothes RCMP officer as he and his colleagues unceremoniously ushered journalists out of Charlottetown’s Delta Hotel. Evidently that time was not yesterday and that place was not the Conservatives’ annual summer caucus meeting. Read the rest of this entry »

Alternative Routes
Blog posting #5
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

I knew for sure that Newfoundland was a unique place when the man at the next picnic table began talking to us. We were sitting in a small park in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, filling up on french fries from the Rips Chips truck stationed next to the park.

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