Community
What is a healthy community? This question has been answered many times with many different answers — probably one for each culture on the planet. One man’s definition of healthy community may be another man’s anti-definition. 
For example, the CEO of the corporation that invested in growing bananas in Guatemala might have thought healthy community meant a well-organized feudal fiefdom where the workers toiled away in wage slavery and his corporation’s shareholders reaped the profits without returning any benefits to the Guatemalans whose labor supported the whole organization. For the Guatemalans who wanted to organize into a labor union and petition the corporation for a better deal, they realized the corporation for what it is — a ‘community’ of investors that behaves like a sociopath. The resultant killing of labor union activists by right wing Guatemalan mercenaries was funded by the corporation. At the time, the U.S. government wanted to prosecute this corporation. The lawyer who defended the corporation successfully is now the U.S. Attorney General — so much for a so-called healthy justice system. The irony bites deep all over the third world where local communities are mercilessly exploited by neo-colonialists working for a New World Order ‘empire’.
My own exposure to such communities came through my years of study in mostly India and Nepal where I got my B.A./M.A. in community health and development. My B.A. thesis theorized on how healing happens and my M.A. thesis tried to identify appropriate development for the central Himalaya. So, my educational background and experiences as a student intern with real experience in the field in third world developing countries has shaped my definition of ‘community health’. I have observed the local primary health services in villages and towns, watched clinic workers take care of children, observed death up close and personal when health services failed, watched kids living at town dumps picking up trash, taken in homeless children, and came to understand the processes at work that help promote disease and unhealthy communities. I have also seen isolated communities where healthy ways of living had been established and the balanced relationship of the community with its local environment where people meet their own needs and the surplus meets the needs of their neighbors. Almost everyone shares with each other and the community’s resources are not appropriated for exploitation by a private business, corporation, or local mafia network.
I have also been an English teacher for more than 15 years and lived with students and fellow teachers. A school often becomes a community center where health education and infant/mother nutrition classes can happen. Learning how to be healthy and stay healthy through identifying and changing unhealthy habits is no easy task. Most people will choose a routine that is comfortable and if that has come to include bad habits like smoking and drug addiction that relieve the pain of a life of drudgery — changing those habits will be like pulling teeth. Corporations and businessmen that have become addicted to the ‘fruits of capitalism’ are the hardest of all to change. Darwinian social values still ‘rule the roost’ within the nests of most ‘predator capitalists’. Try telling one of these predators that cooperation with workers is for the good of the company and he might laugh in your face or worse. I have lived on the Thai-Burmese border in a so-called ‘special economic zone’ set up by the Thai government for local exploitation of Burmese workers by private investors in garment factories and other local industries. It is a ‘win-win’ situation for the rich investors who receive special tax breaks and privileges but the Burmese who try labor union organizing are faced with the same situation as the banana pickers in Guatemala. The Thai police can be called in at any time by a local factory owner who holds Burmese workers’ passports for deportation, and in some instances, worse treatment.
Thus, choosing to work for ‘community health’ is a lifelong task that requires an honest commitment to raising children into a group that instills in them the values of cooperation, sharing, and valuing their family and neighbors over personal greed. Capitalism is sure to pull on the ‘heart strings’ of greed and always finds individuals in every community ready to exploit others in service of self. It is a relentless struggle — one that unfolds in every country all over the world. 
It seems only the bankers of the world who have fed off the rest of us for generations have set up their own ‘cozy’ nests — like Switzerland — where they can enjoy a lifestyle they deny to everyone else. I have visited Switzerland, gone up inside its mountains, seen its beautiful countryside and well-organized society. I don’t remember meeting any impoverished people there. However, I also found the well-heeled citizens of this country intolerably boring to meet and talk with. I would rather spend my time with the poor of this world. They, indeed, may not have many material possessions but often possess more self-contentment than I observed among the Swiss and other better off Europeans. I suppose I have become a ‘gypsy’ at heart and am still in search of a ‘healthy community’ to settle down among its inhabitants and share my experience with others. I’ll let you know when and where I find such communities. By networking between them, it is possible to slowly grow a healthier world amidst a dying, capitalist-damaged one.
I find myself in a large Chinese city now but have completed a move to its suburbs. Chengdu is not far from an even larger metropolis. I am here for a while but my heart seems set on higher and more isolated places. I presently plan on spending more time in the mountains. I am slowly becoming a better teacher and need to retreat from the worldly so-called paradises of the elites who supposedly rule this world. Only time will tell when they finally realize that the universe only sees them as the parasites they truly are.
January 3, 2011 … Dhane Blue