This is where it started: my first visit to the first community: Rugby, North Dakota, January, 2003. Why does one go to Rugby in January, you ask? If you want to see what a town is made of, you have to see it in the tough season, as well as the sweet, and January in Rugby is the tough season.
Each year the Moms' Club
has to do one public service project in the community. One project was gathering winter coats from the community and dispersing them to those in need. The group has established its own once-a-week pre-school using the various expertises of the moms in the group to enrich their children's learning experience. The most recent project involved putting together "overnight bags" for children taken from their parents and placed in foster homes. Businesses in Rugby were "overwhelmingly generous" in helping fill the overnight bags with necessities such as tooth brush and tooth paste, comb, soap, etc. The Land's End Company donated forty bags. When prepared, the overnight bags were turned over to the county's social services department to dispense as the need arose. For its efforts, the Rugby Moms' Club recently won its organization's "Most Outstanding Chapter" award. Tammy served a year and a half as the chapter's president and has now let go of the reins and works as a member of the group rather than as its leader. "It's hard to let go of control," Tammy said, "but I'm learning."
As Tammy didn't grow up in Rugby, she brings an outsiders view to the discussion of the issues facing the community. She doesn't wear the blinders that the rest of us have when we live all our lives in a community. Yet sometimes because she is not native she is not privy to why things are the way they are. This is a tension - between accepting and being accepted, knowing and not knowing - that may be common in all the Vagabond focus communities, and indeed across all of rural America generally.
To be continued....
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