I had a different post I was going to share today, but it feels like a missed opportunity to focus on helping friends. For many of us — overseas and stateside — unprecedented change is happening in our communities. Our development colleagues are faced with incredibly uncertainty about their homes, their jobs, their efforts at work. Bigger minds than mine will figure out the bigger policy pieces, but supporting our friends, our communities? We can all do that.
Offer to listen. Don’t fix. Acknowledge feelings, acknowledge the angst and worry. Give a hug if you’re a hugger. Just listen.
Offer specific ways you can help. If you suggest that you’re there to help, however they need, it might not be specific enough. Our friends are triaging their lives; what goes what stays … they are in crisis mode. People in crisis mode may not be thinking in lists and tasks. They move from task to task in a numb fashion, trying not to break the thin layer of control they have over their turbulent emotions. By offering specific tasks you are helping them by easing the load, and by not making them come up with something for you to do (another task).
Be the eyes they need to see if they are missing things. We’ve all moved many many times. We know what needs to be done. Our friends now have to do this in an abrupt, unplanned fashion and with no known destination, no plan for what is next.
Taking care of things like helping with a pet, taking care of bills, or being responsible for selling larger items like a car … all one less worry. Hosting a small gathering just to bring people together. Dropping off a bottle of wine and cookies, just to be kind. Offer to have the little people over so big people can take care of tasks. Help our friends with some sort of semblance of normalcy, of community, of friendship.
This is not about whether or not we support what is happening on the big picture level. This is about taking care of the people impacted by thoughtless hasty sweeping gestures that are uprooting families, and tossing them aside. Let’s take care of them.
A friend of mine has referred to the general direction of the US policies and efforts as a giant sea vessel, and generally, for the most part the vessel maintains course. I think, historically that is accurate. But right now, it feels a little like a large large number of us trying to live on, and work on the ship have been forced off, some of life rafts, some just thrown overboard. It isn’t clear if we can pull them back on the ship, but we 100% have to help everyone into a life raft of some sort.
Dear friends who are going through this upheaval: I am so sorry. I am here for you.
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