Community Lost Chapter 1 Summary

Society is fooled into believing in the applied connection among people. Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities emphasizes that, “… the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (5). Members of neighborhoods, cities, states, or countries feel a sense of unity with other members for living in the same place or maybe having the same basic values, but true unity comes from understanding the similarities among each other, considering the impact a person can have on another, and caring about lives. Recognizing the importance of lives being socially intertwined is necessary to sustain a considerate society.

The community I grew up in central Texas celebrated my heritage, honored differences in culture, and fostered personal growth and self-discovery. My parents, with the strong work ethic they developed on their family’s farms in Ghana, encouraged my brother and me to work hard and find ways to use our skills to be of service to others, which wasn’t hard to do growing up in Austin with its many avenues to become involved and take care of the community, whether it was helping to direct families through the Trail of Lights at Zilker Park during the winter or raise money for educational programs for underprivileged kids in the area through working the concession stands at the University of Texas at Austin. It was this collaborative mindset that Austin

Have you ever felt safe somewhere, but realized your only protection was ignorance? In Jacqueline Woodson’s When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, she introduces the idea that as you grow and change, so does your meaning of home. Over the course of the story, Woodson matures and grows older, and her ideas about the town she grew up in become different. When she was a nine year old girl, Woodson and her sister returned to their hometown of Greenville, South Carolina by train. During the school year, they lived together in Downtown Brooklyn, and travelled to.

“There’s lots of traditional thinking buried deep within each story and the longer you spend thinking about it the more you learn about yourself, your people and the Indian way” (Wagamese, 1994, p.145). Reuniting with his family, discovering his heritage, connecting with community members, and learning the traditional teachings and practices have greatly impacted his sense of self, identity, and values toward community. It was foundational to his self-discovery and community connection that he had several people like his sister who were willing to share the family history and their ties to the community. To understand the nature, processes and experience of sense of community at any one time for a particular community it is necessary to have some appreciation of the community’s history (Pretty, 2006). Working closely with Keeper and reconciling the negative feelings his mother had toward losing him has likely helped solidify an aspect of community wherein members matter to one another and that their needs will be met by staying

In the book, The House on Mango Street, there seems to be one thing that connects everyone together. Everyone who is stuck on Mango Street is in poverty one way or another. They have all been negatively affected by poverty. The reader can see this in multiple places, such as Esperanza, Esperanza’s family, and Esperanza’s friends. All of these people with different background and different beliefs brought together by a single entity.

But the most disturbing part of this book is not that it shows that we lack community, but that we are so far gone from any real community that we need pain and suffering to suffice. Junger points to instances where people have been far happier under prolonged situations of extreme hardship, like in warzones and during natural disasters. Often after things had turned to normal, people wanted those hard times back. People become like a tribe during those situations; they share food, sleep near each other, and depend upon each other for preservation of their lives. He points to the way physiological disorders and suicide rates have gone down in a community when a situation of physical duress occurred.

The book proves that a sense of communal unity arises when the lives of many are falling apart. In Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell, she provides a stunningly paradoxical answer to the question of social transformation, but often creates problems that weren’t necessarily there. In a world of seemingly unrelenting catastrophes, where can one find a justifiable reason for sustainable social change? Solnit provides a strikingly enigmatic answer: right there, at Ground Zero, with the

Community helped each other and they also accept some things such as accepting shadrack and blaming Sula for everything while she was alive and feeling bored when she was dead. When Eva’s husband Boy boy left her Eva only had $1.65 and she did not knew what to do. Community helped her Suggs family brought her warm bowl of peas, plate of

Hurricane Matthew began to form itself from a tropical wave off the coast of Africa in late September. It has been calculated that 26 citizens have died as a result of Hurricane Matthew’s flooding. Robert Ray, the author of the CNN News article, ‘‘Hurricane Matthew: Days of disaster unfold under a cloudless sky,’’ wrote this to inform his audience of the monstrous damage that the hurricane has done from Florida to North Carolina, after it hit Haiti and other Caribbean countries. His audience is the family and love ones of the citizens that experienced the hurricane hit and those that are concerned of the terror the people went through and want to find more information in how to help. Ray’s use of appeal to pathos helps him effectively be able

Everyone is affected by life’s circumstances. The responses to those experiences can have a positive or negative outcome in one’s future. In Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, the protagonist, Esperanza, gives us her views on life, how she views herself, and she views her future. Not only does she give her perspective throughout the story, she tells us of the numerous experiences that she grows through. These experiences have an impact on her, creating new emotions and new adult like perspectives she has never faced before.

The community has had an unforgettable impact on the development of cultural values, and so should not be delegated to a small area. A community is a collection of individuals who share similar cultural values and traditions and act upon those values in such a way that the collective good of all is influenced. By contrast, a neighborhood is an area that can be defined on a city map. It is a collection of individuals that live in geographic proximity and often depend upon the same resources. Of course, this disparity in definitions leads to the question of how both communities and neighborhoods go through the process of formation.

In the series of vignettes The House on Mango Street, the author Sandra Cisneros details the life of main character Esperanza, a young girl living in a barrio of Chicago. As Esperanza tells the reader about her experiences in her day to day life, the reader hears about her struggles and dreams, her hopes and expectations in life and how these affect her. Being a young girl, Esperanza holds naivety and hope for the world, not having experienced many mature situations or society yet, and since she is going through the time in her life when she begins experiencing these issues, we see her heartbreak and the world she knew shatter. For example, when Esperanza and her family move to Mango Street, as our story kicks off, her parents would often talk about the life that they would get when they win the lottery, like having “A real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked.

They lived in a segregated neighborhood in a segregated town. They left “home” when she was 9 but she felt like “ home was turning its back on her without so much as a goodbye” This specific quote is important because it demonstrates now that she is older her perspective of Greenville changed since she was young. In conclusion, there is little doubt that Greenville has changed.

More than 3,600 homes were destroyed on Galveston Island and the added toll on commercial structures created a loss of $30 million, about $700 million in today 's dollars.” While the storm was extreme, so was the response of the survivors. Despite the unimaginable devastation the survivors faced, they immediately began rebuilding their city. By 10 a.m. Sept. 9 the Mayor of Galveston, Walter C. Jones had called an emergency city council meeting, and by the end of the day had appointed a Central Relief Committee. The newspaper even continued to publish from Galveston and never missed an issue.

In defining social vulnerability, the terms are different than vulnerability being applied to built systems but instead refers to potential harm to people. This means certain types of people or groups of people, whose ability to manage and recover is lessor than other portions of the population. Core elements for assessing social vulnerability must first be divided into resources and characteristics influenced by socioeconomic status, environmental and types of infrastructure within the community. Using these categories social vulnerability can be linked to levels of risk and resiliency among populations. Furthermore, measures for social inadequacies are shaped by social status, ethnicity, and gender which happened to be the makeup of many of the communities effected by Hurricane Katrina.