Living together

Part of the experience of coming to Iona as a volunteer is the opportunity to live in community with others. You will live in a house with 14 – 15 other volunteers from all over the world. Together you share living, eating, relaxing, bathing and sleeping space. So, 15 of us share 1 kitchen, 1 common room, 2 showers, and four toilets. We have three bedrooms that each sleeps five. In my sleeping quarters I share with two young women under 22, one young woman who will celebrate her 30th birthday in a couple of weeks and there are two of us on the other side of 50. We all have comings and goings, and while there is some similarity of time, our schedules vary. I have only actually seen one of my roommates twice, she tends to work the very early shift and come in very early in the morning. So today I had the luxury of a day off, and was in bed until 9, while all my other roommates quietly got up and went about their preparations for going to work. You learn to move swiftly and purposely to get out of the room. By the same token you get quite good at coming in quietly, many of the young people stay out well past my bed time (which is difficult to gauge, since the sun sets at 11 p.m.), and rarely do I hear them come in. We share responsibilities for cleaning our spaces, rotating between bath/shower, kitchen and common room, in addition to cleaning our rooms. And we do it together at a scheduled time on Tuesday evening. On Friday mornings we have a scheduled time to gather and discuss the problems that we are experiencing living together. We talk about having to clean up after ourselves, picking up things we leave behind and washing our own dishes. There is no screaming or complaining, simply the acknowledgement from each of us that if we did our parts our life together is so much easier. Fifteen people from six different countries agree that we can improve our common life by working together. What would it mean if we each worked with 15 other people to make our little place in the world; work, home, play a little better place? That would be a thin place.