It Takes a Village
by Dana Smith Bader in OTR Blog
When I was three years old, my parents moved from New Orleans, Louisiana, my birthplace, to Bahrain. We lived in a compound community with other expat families, and we knew everyone in our community – the other parents and children, the compound shopkeeper, the security guards at the gate, the cleaners, the workers at the cinema, and the nurse at the small clinic near the front entrance – literally, everyone. We grew up knowing we belonged to our community, and the members of our community knew they were partly responsible for the care of all of the children in the compound because we moved freely from house to house and from our houses to the compound facilities. One day, when all of the children were playing hide-and-seek, one of my sister’s friends got lost. Within five to ten minutes, all of the adults available in the compound were searching for the girl, and she was found within another twenty minutes. It turns out, she had snuck into the air-conditioned compound cinema to watch part of a film that was playing because she got bored and hot playing outdoors. The attendant alerted her parents, and she was quickly ‘rescued’ from the cinema. Click here to read the full article
by Dana Smith Bader, Director, Over The Rainbow Nursery
