Reply to Growing up, did you family do things for friends, neighbors and the community?

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Growing up, did you family do things for friends, neighbors and the community?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yep.  They were really active in their church, so we took meals to sick parishoners and participated in the various activities through the church: building houses with Habitat for Humanity, donating to the angel tree, food drives, coat drives, etc.  My mom was on the board of a home for severely developmentally disabled children, and, in addition to fundraising for them, she also went in to sit with and hold the babies.  Then she worked to help develop a center with a food bank, senior center, and various social services under one roof in our town.  My dad always helped with these things, often contributing his labor (he's a pretty skilled carpenter and handyman).  In retirement, she volunteers weekly at the local food bank, and delivers meals to seniors and drives them to their medical appointments.  And they often helped out neighbors informally -- shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor, taking a meal to someone who had a baby or something, etc.

We were not well off -- solidly middle class, all vacations were in our camper or visiting family, tight budgets, etc. -- but they always took service seriously.    [/quote]

My family was very much like the above poster's and it very much feels like a natural way of life to me. As a transplant who has not connected to an already established community, I always feel like there is something missing in this area from my life in DC. I have done some occasional volunteering over the last few years and do take meals to friends, but in general our community activities are much more formally organized and almost always benefit people I don't know personally. It's very different. I'm realizing that a lot of my self-worth came from what I contributed to the community or what kind of a community member I was. Not necessarily bad, but definitely not something that I have done a lot to pass on to my children as a value. I would like them to see the importance of community service. It just feels forced to seek out organizations to volunteer with instead of being a natural part of our community life.

I'm from California and we certainly took each other meals, but I hadn't heard the term meal train until moving here.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics