Page 20 - C.A.L.L. #46 - Summer 2020

Pendragon Community, UK

There are 7 of us living here at the moment, 2 of them have children who are shared with a

parent who doesn’t live here and those two children also visit and are considered to be within
our family meaning that our family extends into their other homes, too, from the point of
view of contagion. We have spare capacity and have invited several vulnerable people to join
us on the basis that they quarantine in an area of the house where they can stay completely
isolated, cook their own food etc. Not all of them have been able to come, sometimes
because they don’t think their child would be able to quarantine effectively.

Life for us community dwellers is indeed good, we have plenty of good food and large
communal meals, we are company for one another, the children play together, we often all
play games together in the evening. Some of us actually prefer it like this, because they find
normal community life stressful with people coming and going all the time, or because it gives
them an excuse to have uninterrupted quality time with their child, etc. But it will be good
when we again start to be able to have activities involving the wider community, however far

that may be away at the moment.

Unusually our community is on the edge of a small town so it’s normally a place used by lots of
other people as well as the residents.

Some of the people here are WWOOFers who happened to be here when the pandemic
struck. Work continues on preparing and planting the vegetable garden and maintaining the
grounds, we do yoga in the morning but there is less to do generally. Financially there is very
little income at the moment but we have reserves. There is no testing for the virus currently

available in the UK other than for very few people in hospitals so we assume no one in our
‘family’ has had the virus. I am 67, the oldest, and hoping not to get infected in this crisis
phase of the epidemic here and I think everyone is being sensible. Some people think there
may be a positive outcome from this situation, like the more socially responsible attitude
that followed World War 2, and a relaxation of our murderous assault on our planet, but I
will be surprised, generally I think the pain this is causing is likely to make people even less
considerate when they are able to get back to ‘normal’, and in the UK we have an entrenched
right wing government for the next 5 years, cut off from our European neighbours.

Roger
A community in the Black Forest, Germany

Our last info meeting was small, 10 had registered to come but only 2 showed up because the
school in Furtwangen had already closed due to an infection. So we thought about bringing
people together online. Things should go on. We took advantage of the app “Teamspeak”. We
meet once a week on Thursday evenings at 6 pm. This is also an opportunity for people to
make contact with our community if they reside in other federal states. All questions are
answered as far as possible and there are also very funny conversations, which are very
pleasant in this time of very negative information and moods at home. So we can exchange

information easily and safely.

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