Conversation with Barb

Yesterday I kept an appointment I had made with Barb Booth, our school administrator, to talk about my cleaning project. This was at her suggestion. I did not take notes, but i do want to record here what I remember. I don't think I could have taken notes, since it was really storytelling.

When Barb was in her mid twenties she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Sierra Leone. This was in the '70's, before the made influx to the urban areas from the coutryside, and before the terrible years of violence, rape, and pillage.

She toughed it out for a year teaching in a high school, which was a farce that she hated. Then she took another training in agriculture and was sent to a village - aid workers who were women were being allowed to work in agriculture for the first time that year.

Though there were unenlightened practices in the villages (wife-beating, child-beating), there was much about the life of community and simplicity that appealed to Barb, and when she returned to the States, she began looking for a community that embodied or practiced similar virtues. Ultimately she found the Camphill village at Kimberton, Pa. She began a bio-dynamic training. Within weeks, after a houseparent left the community abruptly, she was made a house parent with responsibility of shepherding a number of developmentally-challenged villagers, cooking and cleaning, as well as working in the gardens.

Barb ended up staying on for seven years. She told me that this was toward the end of the heavily European-influenced "co-workers," who had strong opinions about everything from anthroposophy to the correct way to wash a floor.

Despite kicking against the pricks at times, it was here that Barb really experienced a different way of living that turned on its head the customary American way of thinking that elevates product above process (not Barb's words) - that values work according to some sort of hierarchy of importance. And very low on that ordinary, customary way of thinking is the work of cleaning. Custodial work.

But here in the Village where the villagers were able to do what they could, and work that was valued, no matter how slowly it might be achieved, then everyone had the dignity of being able to contribute work of value.