Community Matters: Reasons to feel lucky

Hello!

I’m writing this on another gorgeous day in Torbay and the sun is shining! How lucky we are to live and work in this beautiful part of the world!

I am extra lucky because I live on a street where all our neighbours know each other. We share what we have with each other … from babysitting to vegetables, furniture, clothes and handy person skills. We all look after each other when we need a helping hand or a bit of a boost … with company, baking, lifts, shopping…and even jump leads!

Last Sunday we celebrated ten years of our community picnic … we all came together to share delicious food, music, joy, fun and games. Children, young people, families and older people all came together to chat, play, draw, blow bubbles, smile and dance. 

We’ve had some brilliant picnics in Wellswood over the past ten years …on Ilsham Green and at Stoodley Meadow… cream teas, barbeques… with live jazz, bouncy castles, flashmobs and parachute games.

Thinking about how lucky we all are to live here, I can’t help thinking about all the people all over the world who are not so lucky right now. Whilst we all have our struggles, we are not being bombed or starved in conflict. Our babies are not dying because our mothers have no milk and baby formula is being blocked.

Our children are not being targeted by snipers, queuing for food and water. Our doctors are not being imprisoned and murdered - and our hospitals are not being destroyed. Sometimes this feels hopeless. Although we can feel compassion, we may feel helpless. We can see a genocide being inflicted on the Palestinian people in Gaza.

What can we do? It can feel like an impossible drop of hope in a relentless ocean of power … but… we can do something … email our MP, sign petitions, and boycott goods coming from those powers who are funding the bombs. At least we will be able to tell our children that we did something…that we cared and we tried. 

Let’s all take more care of each other.