What Love in the Time of Cholera imparts about community organising
Active care, ability and knowledge
Let me start with a disclaimer - I did not finish Love in the Time of Cholera. I flew threw the first third of the book, fascinated by the parallels drawn between illness and love, the embracing of suffering under the illusion of love and how our personal stories are deeply embedded within the story of our contexts . Cities, wars, prominent families, Sunday afternoon norms - these are all as much part of our stories as our own struggles, hopes, and dreams.
I could not finish the book, though - but this piece is not about the book itself, nor related to any study of the book in any real depth. It is about how wherever we look, we can find examples of care and love which direct us towards what it means to be in a community. Sometimes we forget that we are all connected, that our experiences are woven from a common thread which bind us in powerful ways. I forget it often, as I think about my personal goals and the timeline I’ve set for myself, and the things I have to do and the expectations I have to meet.
In a society built for the individual to thrive as an individual, what is the place of thinking for the community first?
A quick flash back to Gabriel García Márquez’s writing - we meet a man, a doctor, who has gone on his journey of self-education and qualification. A journey a lot of us embark on, and feel proudly for it. Tertiary education is a gift, and how do we use it? The doctor - Dr Juvenal Urbino - finds himself coming back to his home city after his education is complete, and sees the city through the lens of what he has learnt. He sees the ways in which the city is killing its people, and the ways in which this could be improved.
“His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highest authorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and to build in their place a closed sewage whose contents would not empty into the cove at the market, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead.” (p 108-109)
A lot of us become critical and aware of what needs changing through our degrees in arts, science, engineering, law, medicine. What we learn helps us grow into more self-aware, and worldly individuals - capable of anger at injustice, joy at scientific development and all the mixed emotions which come with both these things. We are driven by our own need for connection with the world at large, trying to understand how we fit into it and deep down, I believe most of us are asking: what can I do to contribute?
Capitalism (and resulting political decisions) has of course distorted this view for a lot of us, though. A degree becomes about the money return through a salary (which is a fair view when university costs what it costs, and the HECS debt indexation crisis continues and debt threatens to cripple us). We lose sight of the reason for us being involved, engaged, contributing members of society - it is not for personal gain, or for creating a successful name for ourselves, or being able to maximise our productivity and labour so we might be able to retire early. All of these can be by-products - but that is not why the fields of law, medicine, engineering - even accounting, consulting, etc. - have developed as much as they have. In the end, it is about an obsession that the human race has with creating better conditions for each other and improving our lived experiences.
“The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air.” (p 109)
We see inequality and a lot of the time we feel hopeless - partly because of the quasi-truthful message that one person cannot fight against centuries-old systems and power structures. And partly because we do not feel equipped. Our degrees fall short when it comes to mobilising our critical thought into a strategy. They have purposely omitted from the curriculum the connection between the state of the world and how we might shift and change it to better serve those who have never been served by it.
“Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose an obligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He fought in vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the centuries had become swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week and incinerate it in some uninhabited area.” (p 109)
How do we ‘attempt to force’ institutions of power to listen to us - whether we have learned knowledge or lived experience, or stand in solidarity with those who do? How can we demand for changes to be imposed, which would improve the lives of our community members. How can we fight (not in vain) for the things which we know would create a better present, and future?
For Márquez’s character, the hygiene and sanitation was a clear problem, and he fought as a man of influence and civic duty for the Council to impose changes - a new sewer system, training courses for building latrines, a system of rubbish collection and incineration.
Seeing this in book about love, I paused. It struck me as a comment on how far love and care can take us, when we have the knowledge, ability and influence to demand change. A lot of have love and care for the community around us, the cities and land which hold our lives. We love and care for our own health and that of our loved ones. We are lucky that a lot of our needs are met, but what is missing? And who is it missing for?
What in our community are we fighting for?
When we listen to others, we share the stories of our lives more openly, we come to understand that there is much that we can contribute to in terms of change. Our degrees, our skills, our abilities, our voices and levels of influence (as voting citizens, or as experts, or as workers in a union) have POWER to create the changes. The first step is for us to marry the critical thought and knowledge we have learned with the belief that change is possible if we turn our hearts and minds towards it. In a way that Dr. Juneval Urbino did.
Beautifully written Zenia! Need to add this to the to-read list of books!