Neighborhood: Where is everyone?

When we heard of her death, only one question gasped out of every mood, “What happened to her?” Having battled with the agony of loneliness, Irene at the age of 27 committed suicide. She had felt useless and alone until that last Friday when she decided to end it all. Irene suffered a brutal loneliness.

Loneliness, whether it’s a community or an individual problem (which I believe are two in one), is a common human suffering. It comes with additional killers such as drugs and alcohol, excruciating agony, and seclusion. Millions of people, like Irene, are lacerated by the heavy burdens of loneliness. Why should people suffer loneliness in a world of billions? What has gone wrong with our neighborhoods?

The term neighborhood may be hard for a twenty-first century child to understand because of its rare usage today. Nevertheless, its meaning permeates through our contemporary experiences.

Neighborhood is a spatial unit in which face-to-face social interactions occur – the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realize common values, socialize youth, and maintain effective social control¹. In other words, when people live together in a proximate area with easy social networking and interaction, neighborhood is created.

Human society is dynamic. Its changes are inevitable, rapid and radical. In today’s advanced societies, one can see at first glance an explicit portray of a broken neighborhood. In contrast to some past decades where a neighbor screamed from the window to say good morning, today’s life is a complete shut-in. Life is personalized, and our natural human availability of love is sentenced to individualism. Do we know the names of our neighbors? How many people feel safe in their neighborhood? Practically, all of us can experience the consequences of this so-called advanced lifestyle.

Growing up in the African community, I learnt a lot about the essence of neighborhood. The community, in most African societies, is the nucleus of an individual’s existentiality. An Akan proverb says, “When a person descends from heaven, he or she descends into a human community”. In a commentary, Kwame Gyekye, an Akan philosopher wrote, “[T]he person who descends into a human community cannot live in isolation, for he is naturally oriented toward other persons, and must live in relation with them.”² Ontologically, the human being is social. We can substantiate this scientifically based on how our cognitive mechanisms and social qualities work. We think to love, and feel to communicate with others and things.

Irene could have been alive today. Even if not, loneliness shouldn’t have been her killer. Sadly, it was so. Humanity can do better. Love devotion to humankind is service to God. As it is written: “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4: 20 NASB). A strong relational network can save us from so many social ills. Simple things such as good morning, hello, how are you, a smile, etc. can break the chains of loneliness. More importantly, we need people, and people need us too to live.

Schuck, Amie and Dennis Rosenbuam, “Promoting Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods: What Research Tells Us about Intervention.” The Aspen Institute, 2006. ▲
Kimmerle, Heinz. I, We, and Body: First Joint Symposium of Philosophers from Africa and from the Netherlands, at Rotterdam on March 10, 1989. Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1989, p. 53. ▲