This past year I worked for a wonderful company, started by Jean Vanier, called L’Arche. L’arche assists people who have varying kinds of physical and developmental disabilities. This entailed living and assisting them and ensuring their wellbeing. It was an amazing year, full of laughing, learning and growing. There were five people living in the house, and three-five assistants (depending on the time of the year), and we all live and grow in community.
During my time there I learned a lot about patience and it really opened my eyes and my mind. I never really noticed how much I judge people until I worked here. A lot of people tell me this job is very “honourable” but to be honest, I basically just stand around and make sure people don’t fall over, and then occasionally fill out some paperwork. There are some incredibly smart people that live there, and incredibly creative human beings with big hearts and souls.
This one lady in particular, her name is Janet, she loves to write, and draw, and paint, and often she tells me she wants to set up a painting corner. Before coming to work there, I had gotten into doing a lot of art, so I decided to sit down and start to do art with her. She and I started to do a lot of painting: we painted a backdrop for the community party events, we painted birthday presents for assistants or just friends, and we painted pictures of our house.
An example of this is a piece I did for this post, it depicts our house that we share together, floating up on balloons, like in the movie UP. Everyone in the house gathered together and lent their fingerprints to be the balloons. It was a real coming-together event.
This is Art… bringing people together to create a common goal. Together we made this piece: Janet, myself and all our friends with thumbs. Art brings people together, lending up to spend time together and enjoy the company of each other and our common interests.
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