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Communitites for the Disabled - L'Arche International
It is normal and important for children to leave their families at a particular moment of their life. Usually this happens more or less smoothly and one’s favourite dish or the compassionate and open ear of a mother or a father are good reasons to return home from time to time. Otherwise, one enjoys the newly gained freedom until the moment comes to found one’s own family.
When people with an intellectual disability experience this need for independence, they and their parents are at the same time forced to acknowledge the difficulties that they might have in getting along with the struggles, both large and small, of autonomous everyday life.
Jean-Pierre, a long-term member of L’Arche now living in the small village of Ambleteuse in the North of France, is well aware of this dilemma: “I don’t like carrots and I don’t like people going into my bedroom”. But whilst acknowledging his need for autonomy, he also expresses the need that there should be others who “are responsible for us, responsible for making sure nothing happens to us, for example if we are knocked over in the road”.
Community-building is not always easy and a community-family can only be harmonious if each member is accepted for who he or she is. Community means being carried and yet being free to decide if one wants to let the other in one’s bedroom or not. Quoting Jean-Pierre once more, community means that “decisions must be taken with the team: in principle that can mean us, that can mean the assistants who work with us”.
L’Arche often sees itself as a big, international family. And indeed, many elements of family life can be found in our communities: personal involvement, a sense of belonging and above all long-term relationships that reassure, that give security and that imply, as Jean-Pierre says, responsibility for one another.
Throughout more than 40 years of L’Arche’s history, L’Arche has experienced that people with an intellectual disability enter into relationships with great spontaneity and directness. They are community-builders. And yet, often they did not choose to come into community. As Jean Vanier, the founder, said as early as 1970 in a talk given to assistants, “One of the biggest difficulties… is the division between the assistants and the assisted. Even though we say that our ideal is to create one community, in a way it is not entirely possible. We can strive for this, but in reality it’s not entirely true… There are those who have come to live with us because they voluntarily chose to come and work with us and those who are placed with us…”
When it comes to founding one’s own family or choosing one’s community, the different realities of assistants and assisted become apparent. A Canadian assistant once said, “L’Arche is my second family, the one I could have built with a husband and some children. L’Arche does not substitute my first family, the one of my parents, bothers and sisters.” Jean-Pierre says on this subject: “I don’t know about getting married… I don’t know if I would be able to take care of a family… I would have like to be married, but there you go… My life didn’t work out that way.”
Not having had an alternative, whilst others can choose, is an important gap that community members need to bridge if their community is to merit its name. This is not always easy, particularly at the beginning, but when we enter into relationships, when we celebrate, pray and have fun together, when we have disagreements and then experience forgiveness these simple everyday life moments allow us to let go of the labels “assisted” and “assistants” and just be ourselves.
For community is not a goal in itself, it is a place where one’s favourite dish or the compassionate ear of a friend allow us to be, to grow, to enjoy life and to become responsible for others – no matter if we have a disability or not.
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