Bonds and Values of the Community

For the most part, the people reading these stories are already likely on the “prepper train”, and each of you have good reasons to prepare for the unseen and unknown. This is my story and my reasons:

After graduating from college, I ended up joining the Peace Corps. I lived in a small village in the middle of Madagascar where I was supposed to train the local community in life savings skills — specifically I was there to teach community health. Ultimately, I left having learned so much more from them. I was humbled when my neighbors tried to teach me how to thatch a house using banana leaves, rebuild a bike using junk yard parts, make soap, make candles, butcher my own animals, find water in the wilderness and build a latrine that will last and not stink to high heaven.

Even though I was a scout when younger, I still had spent my life growing up in the city. What I had thought I had learned about surviving away from the city was just an illusion. Making a good fire, building a makeshift shelter or making hunting tools are great skills, but I was never really forced to use these type of skills to actually survive (for more than a few days anyways). The local friends I made as a Peace Corps Volunteer showed me that real survival in a true non-technological world is actually more daunting, yet beautiful as well.

When the harvests were meager, the community had to figure out how to feed their families — I still have a thing for ultra dried fish. When water was short during the dry season, they had to know how to ration but still do all the things they needed (cook, clean, drink). Candle light was not romantic, but a luxury for those who could afford candles. Families that lived too far away from our clinic had to know how to care for the ill. Nothing makes you understand how wonderful modern medicine can be then when you watch people die from common diseases or typically non-mortal conditions, or during child birth.

After Peace Corps, I found myself working in refugee relief efforts around the world. Having been to so many war zones and refugee camps, I was drained by the inhumanity man can inflict upon man when society begins to fall apart and awakened by how quickly a family’s security and comfort can change within a few days. Simple tools and and even innovative survival technology were limited in how much they could sustain people forced to flee their homes in the middle of the night. Many refugees have told me again and again that the greatest challenge and sorrow was not from having lost property, or from the uncertainty, but from having lost the ones they loved, mementos from children and spouses or parents. It was pictures, music, jokes, traditions, stories, the smallest of keepsakes and even the occasional wedding or birthday remembrance that gave so many refugees the capacity to bear the hardship of their uncertainty.

Prepping in the sense that so many people in the prepper community understand is not what I have come to know as preparing for the unforseen. Yes, the skills and the provisions one builds can make daily life easier when a society degrades, but ultimately, it is the bonds and values we build with the people in our community that will save and sustain us. I prepare by building skills and stocking provisions, but in the end I also prepare by making myself capable of dealing with the mental, emotional and spiritual challenges we will potentially face.

I have seen what life can be like when the society you live in has little technology or modern comforts. I have seen what can happen when your world is torn away from you. These realities have made me prepare myself in the case the worse should happen, and even then, what I care about most is that I will have my fiance with me, and hopefully together, we will not only survive, but survive for a reason…to begin again.

No one knows what will happen when the sun rises. It is why being prepared is so important, But I hope that my story also helps all of us in the prepper community to think about the small things in life that will make it all worth while.

M.E.