Welcome to Tent Town

This week has been hands down the best week of my college career so far. Last sunday night about 30 people went and set up tents on the Memorial Mall in the middle of campus. The people came from different campus groups for labor equality, atheism, anarchy, marijuana legalization, probably some others, and a lot good number of people just showed up. That night we hung out and drew everywhere on the walkways with sidewalk chalk. Everyone had their own message encouraging people to question things in their lives and to rely on each other. I was up that night until 6:30 when I went back to my apartment so I could sleep for a few hours.

The next morning activity planners from Purdue came and told the police that we had to go. Many of us had different methods of dealing with the police but a few people from the anarchist group set up meetings with the dean of students and the other people who needed to approve it. Unfortunately we didn't get our approval signed for Monday night but we continued Tent Town elsewhere. On Tuesday we got it approved and so we set up tents and kept them up for the rest of the week, even though the administration pushed us around a few times and tried to complicate things for us. A troubadour and his friend spent the week with us and shared his incredible stories and music every day, so much that his voice was always hoarse and raspy. If you want to hear a little bit of Tent Town, check out his myspace page and you can listen to his music with the box on the upper right, although I hear that his voice isn't raspy in those songs.

The most amazing thing to me about Tent Town was the sense of community that we all felt. Few of us knew each other when we got there but after living together for a little while we felt like family. The beauty of the whole thing explodes for me when I realize that for many of the people who were at Tent Town, it is their community. These people had no other community and likely not that many friends since Purdue is a very isolating place. We were all able to build a web of friendship that we know can support us. Our bonds of friendship moved Tent Town as a community three times over this week to camp out, listen to Ryan and Snorlax (our troubadours), and have a camp fire.

Along with the community feel, we all contributed what we could to feed, clothe, and watch out for each other this week. I left notebooks that were important to me, my bike, my camera, my hammock, and other possessions out at Tent Town all week and people took care of them for me. The hours we all spent chalking, singing and talking brought us very close to each other and helped to make last week many of our best weeks of college ever. Hands down.

I'll leave you with the pictures I took this week (this link works, sorry about that) check them out :D

Freedom, oh Freedom

There's this song I like to sing where I got the blog title from. I think it might be one I learned in Ghana way back in the day. Anyway this morning I was in an empty parking garage and I heard an echo and I thought to myself how perfect of a place this would be to sing. So I belted it out and sang my Freedom song and any hymns I could remember until my voice cracked.

I was thinking about how incredible it would be to fill a gray cement place like that, an empty parking garage or the walkways of Purdue, with loud unashamed singing. Its all part of the 'in this world but not of this world idea' to make our depressing surroundings uplifting. Shane said Mother Teresa called it finding the Calcuttas around us. Even at this university where people are for the most part provided for, the Calcutta is in their loneliness and depression. The bond that group singing makes, the community, love, and solidarity that can be felt is beyond this world.