Jeff Gill and his wife Christine are the children and families pastors at i61 Church in Llandudno, North Wales. They are trying to learn about community from the people they volunteer with at their local community centre. They have three great kids. Christine is also a photographer and like Jeff is very interested in food and meeting the physical as well as spiritual and emotional needs of the people in her community. She draws inspiration from Maria Montessori, who believed that you could not teach children anything unless you took care of their family’s basic needs first, and from the book of James, which has some great ideas on how to meet the needs of the community, and of course Jesus who was always pretty decent with the poor and the hurting as well.

She tends to always be telling stories about when she was little…

I was 6 during the miners’ strike of 1984. I lived in a small mining village.

I guess the strike probably affected me differently than it did my friends, whose dads worked in the mines. My father had been unemployed my whole life anyway.

It was one of the happiest times of my childhood.

Weird, but i really do think back upon it fondly. I laugh at people who get rich and famous and then talk about how wonderful it was when they had nothing and “By ‘Eck, we lived on Mouldy bread and Cloudy Water and we had a sweater between the 6 of us and those were the Days! Ahh Yes!” That’s just stupid. Ooh yeah, having money is such a hardship, isn’t it?

And I know that If I was to go back to 1984 as an adult, I would see the hardship and suffering, families who used to be able to eat well now living on handouts etc, etc. For me, my family had never had money anyway, and we had a neighbour who stole some coal for us on a regular basis, and a forest full of trees to burn.

People’s gardens were full of potatoes and carrots instead of weeds and everyone helped each other out. It was one year that was different from all the others. There were marches through the village, everyone dressing up in silly outfits. My sisters were Martini girls. Black and white outfits, roller skates, and a bottle and glass glued to a tin tray. I was a clown. I was always a clown. I wanted to be Boy George, like my Cousin Donna was.

So everyone in the village would get up and march through the village from the tiniest to the very old and ancient people. There was no “Young people do this and oldies do this and teens do this” we all did it together.

And we marched up to the football field and there were games. Fancy Costumes were judged, races were run- middle aged men holding up their fancy long dresses to try to run faster…

People sold their veggies, and old vases and anything else they could find.

The town jazz band marched around the field with their big tin kazoos blowing (i used to call them gazoots) and we stayed there on that field all day long, It was the middle of summer but I remember dancing and laughing going on till well after dark. And everyone knew each other and the kids got to feel just as important as the grown ups because we were there for it all. And then in 1985, the strike ended and my family stayed inside our four walls, same as we always had done before the strike started, and they’ve been there since.

The kids went back to doing their thing and the adults went back to doing their thing and my little village has never known that community since.

And it is sad.

I like community. I do not like segregation. Little ones do this and bigger ones to this and biggest ones do this, maybe it’s just me, but I do not like it. I like family, not just flesh and blood family but everyone around you type family.

Can this kind of community be built without the hardships like those of the Miners’ Strike? Do we have the oomph to create such a thing?

We shall end with a song, which sounds jolly, but is sad. To especially go along with how I just made the 1984 Miners’ strike sound like fun. You be sure to sing along now.