Notes
…from the Denominational Minister

Henry Paetkau

Dry. Desolate. Discouraging. Depressing.

These were among the words that came to mind last August while driving north from Swift Current to Rosetown, SK, then west into Alberta for a family gathering. I was seeing firsthand the evidence of the drought heard about so much in the news this year. Having grown up on a small fruit farm (albeit with an irrigation system), I'd become keenly aware of the impact of unpredictable weather on farm life. But this sight hit me in the gut like the proverbial ton of bricks. The barren fields looked worse than I had, or could have, imagined. How were these farmers and farming communities coping, I wondered. And what could anyone do to support and help them?

Several responses have generated considerable publicity - hay donations from other farmers, for example, and livestock being moved to someone else's greener pastures. But these are only short-term interventions and the nature of this agricultural crisis is much more complicated. This is more than a rural crisis and goes much deeper than the pocketbook of either the producer or the consumer.

We are, all of us, in this together. That reality was underscored at the Making Peace With the Land conference held in Osler, SK just prior to the annual Assembly of Mennonite Church Canada in Saskatoon last July (see Canadian Mennonite, Aug. 5 issue). Nettie Wiebe, one of the speakers at that conference, writes elsewhere:

There is an intricate interdependence between rural and urban communities. While urban dwellers rely on rural resources for their basic needs, rural people are increasingly dependent on the industrial and cultural goods from urban centres. Further, rural people are on the front lines of the radically changing relationship between humans and their natural environment, which is affecting everyone whether they live in cities, on farms, or in towns. It behooves every-one to try to get a grip on what's happening "out there."

(Nettie Neufeld in Writing Off the Rural West, University of Alberta Press, 2001, pp. 325f.)

What's happening out there is, by all accounts, a natural disaster. Disasters, according to a Mennonite Disaster Service release, cause trauma. Trauma, we are reminded, is contagious and has a way of grabbing us…as if saying, 'Don't think about anything but me…and don't feel anything but the threat, losses or terror associated with me'…Trauma, when viewed as a threat, tends to create anxiety, when viewed as a loss it tends to create depression, and when viewed as a challenge it tends to create energy, growth and new vision…How persons and organizations ultimately respond to tragedy is determined more by our responses to each other than by the traumatic event itself.

How are we responding to each other? An African proverb I read somewhere reminds us that "When the foot has a thorn, the whole body bends to remove it." This sounds like the image of the church as a body in 1 Corinthians 12:26 - If one member suffers, all suffer together with it. Many congregations in drought stricken regions are already acting in response. Let's share this support more widely across Mennonite Church Canada. Here are a few suggestions:

• Acknowledge publicly, in worship and conversation, that the disaster, the loss and the trauma are real.
• Invite, listen to and share the stories of pain, loss and grief as well as of courage, hope and renewal.
• Recognize that we are in this together.
• Pray for and with one another.
• Find tangible ways of connecting and expressing care and support.
• Consider ways of reducing the financial expectations on those experiencing loss of income.
• Read and study 2 Corinthians 8 & 9 to find out how the first Christians responded to an economic crisis.

Henry Paetkau, Denominational Minister