<p>BEFORE THE STORY:</p> <p>Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.</p> <p>Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving &ndash; they&rsquo;ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they&rsquo;ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it&rsquo;s the most efficient way to donate - I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.</p> <p>So please dig deep and donate now.</p> <p>Now...Once upon a time...ahm...blah...This is far from being my story:) I'm not that good with writing.</p> <p>But I have a co-worker colleague who is very passionate about writing stories and she described Camphill life very well in one of her stories.</p> <p>Here comes Hannah F.'s story:</p> <p>I get to spend a year in England, basically free of charge, because I am working as a volunteer co-worker at Camphill Milton Keynes, a community for adults with disabilities.&nbsp; Camphill is a worldwide organization of schools for children, colleges for young adults, and communities like Camphill MK.&nbsp; It began in Scotland, founded by Austrians who had been working with children with disabilities, but who fled Nazi persecution in their country.&nbsp; Camphill operates on basic Christian principles as well as principles of anthroposophy, the same philosophy that guides Waldorf schools.&nbsp; This means that the community where I work is set up to engage the minds, bodies, and spirits of the residents.&nbsp; It makes things a bit cheesy sometimes, but most of the residents are into it.&nbsp; Volunteer co-workers live and work alongside the residents in communal housing and workshops.</p> <p>Camphill Milton Keynes is separated into two estates of MK, Pennyland and Willen Park.&nbsp; There are a total of ten households, each with around six residents, at least two co-workers, and a long-term house co-ordinator.&nbsp; Each house has its own personality, depending on who lives there.&nbsp; In my own house live two men with autism (with nearly opposite personalities), three women with Down&rsquo;s Syndrome (one who fancies herself Queen of the World, a sixty-year old woman who reacted like a child on Christmas when her video game console arrived, and one I hardly ever see because she&rsquo;s so involved in activities, classes, and meetings) and a woman with multiple disabilities (with a fanatic love for Michael Jackson and orange hairspray).&nbsp; It can get very&hellip; &ldquo;lively&rdquo; at times.&nbsp; We eat three meals a day together, relax in the sitting room together, share bathrooms, share walls of our bedrooms, and live life almost like a big family.</p> <p>Most of our week is spent in workshops.&nbsp; The Camphill MK workshops (two gardens, the bakery, the caf&eacute;, the tools workshop, the weavery, and the basket workshop) provide meaningful work that supports the community and gives the residents an opportunity to identify themselves by what they can do, not what they cannot.&nbsp; One weekend, I went with my household to a woodworks fair, where exhibitors were weaving and making baskets just like we do at Camphill.&nbsp; It was almost magical to see the people I came to serve connect someone completely outside the community through their shared trade.</p> <p>My job also includes a lot of time in the house, either helping a resident one-on-one with their personal business (finances, upcoming holidays and appointments, laundry and room cleaning, at varying levels of support) or cooking.&nbsp; When I cook for the house, one or two residents are also there helping to prepare the meal.&nbsp; As a co-worker, I have to gauge what activities each resident can handle safely, and how much I have to do myself in order to have supper for ten people ready on time.&nbsp; Most times it happens, but a few times I&rsquo;ve suffered some dirty looks because I didn&rsquo;t have time to make quite enough for everyone.</p> <p>Festivals and celebrations are a big deal here.&nbsp; We follow the Christian calendar (including those special British holidays like Michaelmas and St. John&rsquo;s Day) and celebrate the cycle of the year with song, drama, seasonal readings, and art.&nbsp; I really can&rsquo;t wait for Christmas, because I know everyone will be excited about it as I am.&nbsp; Birthdays are extremely important, and people who don&rsquo;t get together at any other time will go out of their way to get a gift for someone&rsquo;s birthday (usually shower gel&hellip;don&rsquo;t ask me; it&rsquo;s a Camphill thing).</p> <p>While people back home threatened that I would come back from England with an English accent, it&rsquo;s next to impossible at Camphill.&nbsp; Not only are the residents from every region of the country, but all but one of my volunteer co-workers are from foreign lands.&nbsp; There are a bunch of co-workers from Brazil, a handful each from South Korea, Japan, Romania, and Germany, and individuals from Egypt and Indonesia.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t get a ton of time to socialize with each other, but I love finding out little things about my coworkers that I would not have guessed by their country.&nbsp; A co-worker from Germany shares my love of unicycling.&nbsp; A coworker from Japan has run a marathon.&nbsp; A co-worker from South Korea loves to emulate famous painters.&nbsp; The diversity of the volunteers makes Camphill MK a very interesting place to live and work.</p> <p>Even though living in community is not always an easy or fun thing to do, I am enjoying my work here at Camphill Milton Keynes.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m excited to see how the cycle of the year carries life forward.&nbsp; Now I&rsquo;m getting cheesy!</p>