A day in the village: On small communities, and tiny moments of giving

My friend Gudrun Williams dropped the envelope off at the CBC's front desk.

Tan-coloured and padded with plastic bubbles, it was the kind used to protect precious content. Inside were several posters advertising an upcoming (Nov. 26 to 28)craft fair at The Lantern on Barnes Road in St. John's,plus a handwritten letter on attractively-printed paper.

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"Hello," Gudrun wrote. "It's 10,000 Villages time again this year, an opportunity to combine you Christmas shopping with giving a helping hand."

I had an instant flash-back to last year's fair, the bazaar-like atmosphere, the tumble of shapes and colours, the whole precious nick-nackery of crafts from around the world, and the three little gifts I bought with the feeling that I'd made a tiny but significant move to take me beyond the usual Christmas consumer frenzy.

Ten Thousand Villages is a fair trade organization; according to Wikipedia,one of the world's largest and oldest. It commissions crafts from around the world and sells them at a fair return for the artisans through more than 400 retail outlets and special fairs across Canada and the United States.

'Disappearing at unprecedented rates'

A list tracks the contributing artisans across the southern hemisphere from Indonesia, to South Asia, to the Middle East, deep into Africa, and across the Atlantic into the mountainous regions of the Caribbean and Latin America all parts of the world where villages are still common but disappearing at unprecedented rates.

Ten Thousand Villages is a kind of rescue mission. It's also a statement about where things stand in this world, how they came to be that way, and where they're heading.

The story is familiar, even here.

This province has lost half of its small communities since Confederation; at least 60 per cent of its population is now urban.

That's nothing compared to the Canadian average of 81 per cent.

Globally, the tipping point at which the urban population surpassed its rural counterpart came some time in 2007. The trend continues and is accelerating, especially in Asia and Africa.

Left behind, at our peril

All over, the traditional village is a vanishing reality; as such, it's also become a symbol for change and things we leave behind at our own peril.

Baccalieu Consulting of Bay Roberts has a blog on which it offers a list of 11 traits that would make it into any recipe book for nostalgia respect, close kinship ties, music, storytelling, traditional food, heroes and characters, language and dialect, nicknames, religion, the sea, survival skills.

Of course, you can find all that in towns and cities as well, but not nearly as tidily packaged as in a village or outport.

I grew up in a village nestled into the foothills of the Frankonian highlands of northern Bavaria.

In the early days, people still got their water by pumping it from communal wells and carrying it home in buckets.

There wasn't a single engine in the entire place; every wheel and plough was drawn by horse and oxen.

The elementary school with its six grades was on the second floor of the small Ursuline convent next to the Roman Catholic church.

A town crier walked the main street with a hand bell once a week to proclaim whatever was new and not so new.

Farmers and their livestock lived under the same roof, separated by walls but united by stench. The centre piece of every courtyard was a pile of steaming manure.

No alarm clocks were necessary. Early hours were shrill with the crowing of roosters, the complaining of cows bursting to be milked, the squealing of pigs jostling for their morning slop.

All day long, the place was alive with the flitting of barn swallows and the chatter of sparrows. At sunset, the main street turned into honking pandemonium as the gooseherd drove the village's geese home for the night.

Even the sparrows were gone

The last time I went back was three years ago. Hardly anybody was still farming. The houses were still there, people were still living in them, but everything else I remembered, including the sparrows, was gone. I felt robbed as I found myself going through my own experience of what's been called the "rapid and historic transformation of human social roots".

I was reminded of the following passage in Marvin Gaye's song Save the Children:

Who really cares?

Who's willing to try to save a world

That's destined to die.

It's so tempting to let nostalgia turn into despair, but there was nothing despairing about last year's Ten Thousand Villages fair at The Lantern.

The colours were vibrant, the shapes those of every-day and life-affirming purpose. If you let your mind wander with them, you easily saved yourself the expense of a trip around the world.

A world, by the way, that's never been at rest and never will be, no matter how determined and increasingly desperate we are to save it from itself.