My Community
by Susanna Olson
Susanna Olson, a teen in North Carolina, tells us about her community in three parts, starting this week on the Global Beat. Check back Tuesday for the next installment!
I am who I am because of the people I surround myself with. I am a 15-year-old girl excited about life: college, world travel, learning, growing, writing, teaching, helping, studying, and accomplishing. My dear friends, acquaintances, and family members share all my moments, fabricating them into who I am and who I want to be. Had I been born to another family, if my younger sister hadn’t been there to cheer me up when I felt lower than the lowest, and if I didn’t have an older sister to pull me back into reality after a too long ride on my “high horse,” who would I be? Community is such an important factor of life — but what is it really?
According to New Oxford’s American Dictionary “community” could be “a group of people living together in one place, especially one practicing common ownership,” or “a group of people having a religion, race, profession, or other particular characteristic in common.”
Somehow definitions tend to mush broad beautiful planes of words — full of rich meaning, connotations, and colors — into dry fact balls, squeezed of all its life juice. What if community to me wasn’t just people living together in one place? What if my community consisted of hundreds of people all over the world? What if my community consisted of people of different races, professions, etc.? What if it was a kind of fellowship based on differences rather than similarities?
